Up, Down, Emergency
by the.mightiest.pen
Summary: OUT OF MY SMALL HIATUS! More detailed summary inside. Post-Avengers. When Loki and Jane first meet, they are both, in a sense, prisoners. What happens when Jane busts Loki out of SHIELD custody? A slow-building Lokane adventure filled with heart, humor, twists and turns, thrills and chills! Come see what you're missing...
1. Chapter 1

**Hi everyone! First of all, wow. Haven't written a fanfic in ages. Definitely a combination of having no time and not enough inspiration.**

**Extended Summary:** Post-"Avengers." Jane has been released from the remote SHIELD lab that has served largely as a prison for her. Wrung with confusion and frustration over her helplessness throughout the events in "Avengers," she impulsively asks to meet Loki, who is being held in a maximum security cell before his transport back to Asgard. What will this meeting hold for both of them?

**Author's notes:**

**1. I own nothing.**

**2. Lokane eventually? _Eventually_. I say eventually because they're going to start out very much _not_ in love. So review review review if you want to see me do some serious matchmaking!**

**3. Sorry, not too much Loki in this chapter. But that's why I've posted two chappies at once! Read on for Loki goodness. **

**Enjoy!**

**-tmp**

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Jane Foster, stepping off a private jet flown from one undisclosed location to another. Jane, flanked by SHIELD guards that hovered so close to her she could feel phantom handcuffs on her wrists. Jane, short and sturdy and angry.

She was incredibly, unspeakably angry.

Mere weeks after Thor had disappeared, leaving behind her now-decimated New Mexican home, Jane had received a call from SHIELD. An offer to continue her research at the nation's top facility. A chance of a lifetime. Little had she known that she would live in a bunker, fraternize only with faceless scientists and ominous guards, and never, _ever_ be permitted to speak with Darcy or Erik. This test of will would go on for weeks, months. She would constantly crave sunlight, friendship, conversation - and she would receive none of it.

Eavesdropping on the guards one evening, Jane heard the news that Erik had been kidnapped by an Asgardian, a "hostile." _Not Thor_, she had thought, _please not Thor_. She pressed her ear to the door that separated her from the men and caught a name: Loki. Questions hatched in her brain like a swarm of maggots. Why Loki? What did he want with Erik? What, if anything, could this tell her about Thor?

She had watched the footage of the battle in New York, saw Thor grappling with his brother in a whirl of capes and sparks and explosions. She'd seen shaky and blurred camera footage of a tall man staggering and limping towards a SHIELD helicopter, arms cuffed behind his back, flanked by Iron Man and Thor himself.

In the aftermath of the battle, when the damage had already been done to the people she loved, Jane received a memo from Director Nick Fury, wondering if she'd like to speak with Thor in an undisclosed location. Jane had sat in her sterile bedroom, reading the memo over and over and over – and decided that no, she did not want to speak to Thor. Not yet.

Now, more than anything, and for reasons she couldn't quite grasp, she wanted a word with a different Asgardian prince.

Surprisingly, Jane didn't need to do much cajoling in order to see the fallen demigod. She'd sent her demands and a jet had been waiting on the tarmac the next morning. Sleepless and caffeinated, twitching in anticipation and thanking her lucky stars to be out of that miserable bunker, Jane buckled her seatbelt and watched the earth shrink beneath her.

When the jet arrived, Nick Fury hadn't bothered with introductions. He seemed on edge; Jane sensed that he wanted her out of his facility as soon as possible. He quickly gave her the terms of the visit.

"Miss Foster, I can assure your complete and total safety at all times during this interaction. He's being held in the most sophisticated anti-forcefield containment chamber in the world. You'll take an elevator down to the viewing pod, step off and say your peace, step back in and rejoin us. We've held him down with additional restraints – including a device that prevents him from speaking, so you can say all you want without fear of being–"

"So, a muzzle?" asked Jane.

"…interrupted. And yes, it's a muzzle of sorts."

"Like a dog? I'm supposed to just talk to a caged animal?" Jane could feel a nagging lump gnaw at her throat.

Fury pinched his nose bridge. "Miss Foster, we're dealing with a highly dangerous, outer space war criminal. A literal demigod who practically bested some of the world's most skilled crime fighters using only his words."

"And magic. You're forgetting about magic."

"For all we know, he accesses that magic verbally. No. It's too risky until we get the test results back. I'm sorry, Jane."

Jane felt her lungs boil in her chest.

"You're _sorry_? You shoved me off to a remote, cold lab. I couldn't see my family, my friends. I had to stand by and hear the news _through the grapevine_ that my friend and colleague was in the captivity of the same brainwashing freak who flattened my entire hometown. And now you want me to gripe at him while he stares at me through a windowpane? I'm sorry sir, but no. Not good enough. I don't want to talk _at_ him, I want to talk _to _him. _With_ him."

Fury was unwavering. "Whatever your reasons for wanting to converse with him may be, you cannot think only of yourself. There are people higher up than me who wouldn't stand for it."

"You seem to defy their command often enough, Director."

For a moment Jane couldn't believe she had said that. She had actively engaged a man who looked like he could take five of the Russian mob's best goons. She decided to press her luck.

"Sir, I'm not the same little girl who threw a fit when SHIELD took her laptop. And I'm also not the naïve post-grad who let herself get fooled into being a SHIELD guinea pig for months. I know better now, thanks to you. I can handle myself."

Fury must have somehow agreed, because Jane saw his brow soften. A defeated sigh escaped his lips. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small, gunmetal gray device.

"This is the remote for the mouthpiece. This button opens it. You want to keep your finger good and close to that red button. He speaks one word out of turn, you shut it down. Do we understand each other?"

Jane swallowed, the taste of her own mouth suddenly foreign. She reached out a sweaty hand and grasped the remote. The cold metal against her palm didn't make her feel any more powerful – she hadn't really suspected it would.

The elevator down, down, down to the containment cell was silver. Jane tried focusing on the details to keep her mind busy. Unfortunately there weren't many. There were only three buttons. Up. Down. Emergency. Pale light seemed to come from nowhere – Jane realized there were tiny bulbs built into ridges on the edges of the high ceiling.

How many floors down? Ten? Fifty? Was this what Thor had felt like as he'd descended to Earth? Waiting, distracted, nervous? Dreading the worst?

Oddly curious?

The doors suddenly sprang open with a hydraulic hiss. Funny, Jane mused. She hadn't even felt the elevator stop.

She stepped out and he was directly in front of her.

She started. The glass between them was so clear and so tall that she had to remind herself she couldn't walk up to his bedside.

Bedside was a loose term. If beds were made of metal and came with thick titanium restraints – then it would be a bedside.

He was sleeping, the back of the metal lounge propping up his torso like a modified hospital gurney. The lounge sat at an angle to the glass; the foot of lounge rested a yard from the very spot where Jane stood.

_Details details details details_, Jane reminded herself, heart pounding. He was astoundingly pale, even without the help of the harsh fluorescents; any skin visible underneath the armor he still wore seemed stark white. Tall, with strong features – prominent jawline, aquiline nose, firm cheekbones. Jet black hair swept back from the temples and landing on shoulders that were firmly squared even in slumber. Pert eyebrows drawn ever so slightly together, etching the faintest of lines on his forehead. Slender hands that twitched underneath the restraints anchoring his wrists.

His body bore evidence of injury and weakness. Angry scabs across his nose bridge, his temples. A bruise, here on his cheekbone, there on a knuckle. Were his eyes blacked, or were the dark circles products of fatigue? Chest hitching occasionally, as though his sleeping body still rebelled against deep breathing.

And the muzzle, gray and gleaming and clasping his jaw as his lungs forced breath through his mangled nose–

And Jane was crying. Thick, hot tears spilled from her eyes and down her cheeks and her brain reeled and reeled because she couldn't comprehend why, after all the months of anger and frustration and needing to scream at someone or hit something or stick her middle finger at everyone who was screwing up her world–

Why was she crying at the sight of the cause of _all_ of it?

She turned her gaze to the ceiling and waited for her heart to steady itself and her breath to stop jerking in her chest. One deep inhale, exhale. Two. Three. The ceiling, she noticed, had a miniscule black dot in its silvery surface. Camera? She took one last deep breath and shook her head and let her eyes wander back to the glass–

She choked on her own breath.

Loki was staring straight at her.

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**Review and/or read on, folks! Thanks again!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Aaaand chapter two! Hold onto your hats.**

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Jane couldn't find her breath. Her throat convulsed, trying to send fleeting oxygen to her lungs. Her heart rate dropped until it felt like her entire chest might collapse to the floor.

Silver-green eyes. Pale green eyes, the eyes of a snake. They bored into her skin like hot pokers – dissecting, piercing. Every fiber of Jane's being was screaming for her to retreat to the elevator, flee, run, get away, go, leave–

But instead, before she knew what she was doing, Jane pushed the release button on the mouthpiece remote.

A camera-like click from the device, a tiny hiss of air, and its springs loosened; it fell onto Loki's chest, hanging around the back of his neck. Jane willed her breathing to steady. The demigod concentrated, keeping his eyes focused on his visitor, drawing deep, disciplined gusts of air through his newly freed mouth. He clamped his jaw and worked it back and forth, testing the joint. They stared at one another for centuries, eons.

And then something happened that made Jane's blood run cold: Loki began to sing. Raspy, halting and weak – but singing nonetheless. Jane stood flabbergasted for a good few moments before she recognized the song:

"Sympathy for the Devil." Loki was singing "Sympathy for the Devil."

It was all too much. Jane's knees gave out and she sunk down onto the metal bench in the viewing pod. She buried her head in her hands and just listened. Listened to Loki as he sang the whole damn song, quietly, liltingly. Jane had come all these miles, from one prison to another, to give the gift of speech to a deranged mass murderer whose first utterance in days was an ironic Rolling Stones song.

How – how could he sit there and hum classic rock at her tear-streaked face after she'd done him a _god damned favor?_

She was done trying to talk to the nutcase before she'd even started. End of the road. Jane sighed, head bent, and raised the remote high in the air, thumb poised to push the red button.

Loki fell abruptly silent.

The silence had teeth. Its roar filled the glass containment room and tore at Jane's gut. "Do you know who I am?" she asked without raising her head, her voice flat. She endured another silence before a deep, gritty voice responded:

"Yes."

Jane lifted her head; he was still watching her. He breathed heavily, as though the act of singing had drained him. The dark circles under his eyes looked like ash.

"And you," he said between inhales, "clearly know who I am."

"You've been on TV a lot lately," said Jane. Loki's lips curled upward at the remark and he allowed himself a mirthless chuckle, which quickly became a coughing fit. Jane watched as he struggled to regain his breath, pained and grimacing; she told herself she was supposed to enjoy the sight of him suffering.

Loki cursed between hacks. "Pardon me for a moment," he rasped through his teeth. And in the blink of an eye, he had vanished his wrist restraints, flicked his hand upward, conjured a silk handkerchief out of thin air and coughed violently into it.

Jane's mouth fell open. Loki could break his bonds at will – oh shit, _shit!_ Shitshitshit, she had to tell Nick Fury, had to get back in the elevator, escape–

"They know full well I'm capable of doing this," said Loki, regaining composure and gesturing towards his vanished restraints. "All of SHIELD knows. It's the oral contraption that's a little trickier."

Jane didn't know what to say. Every nerve radiated confusion and outrage.

"You're dreadfully quiet," the demigod continued. "I assume there's another reason for releasing my jaw besides watching me perform ditties like a trained animal."

Jane still said nothing.

"Well, Jane Foster? What brings you here – do you wish to ask me for all the names of Thor's former Asgardian lady companions?" A wicked grin melted through Loki's lips.

Jane could scream. Instead she forced herself to ask an intelligible question: "Why are you still here if you can escape?"

Loki's eyes narrowed. "You clearly know nothing SHIELD knows." He rubbed his wrists to work blood through them. "Otherwise the answer would be obvious: I want to be here."

"I can't see why," ventured Jane. "They're all saying you're going to face Asgardian justice."

Loki let out a scoff that nearly caused him to double over again. "_Justice!_ Oh my, is that what they're calling it? No no, Jane Foster, I'm being taken into Asgardian _protection_."

"From what? Yourself?"

"Don't speak plainly to me woman, you're on very thin ice as it is," Loki snapped. He seemed to immediately regret the outburst – his eyes screwed up, one hand flew to his head and the other to his middle. He instantly corrected the gesture of anguish, though, working his face back into its mask of condescension. He unfurled the handkerchief that he had balled up in his fist and regarded it detachedly. Something in Jane sank when she saw the white silk was covered in blood.

"You're sick," she posited.

Loki vanished the kerchief with a nonchalant flick of his wrist. "I believe 'mentally deranged' is the more proper insult."

"No, no," said Jane. "It's slang… I mean, I was 'speaking plainly' again: you're physically ill."

"What did you people expect?" said Loki, leaning his head back against the metal. His face was whiter than his kerchief had been. "You leave a living thing in an empty cell with no proper nourishment and no medical care after a giant green monstrosity slams it to a pulp, and believe it will completely heal itself. It's preposterous."

Jane applauded inwardly: it was the longest phrase he'd spoken to her yet. "So you can use your magic to escape titanium restraints but you can't heal your own injuries."

Loki closed his eyes and brought two fingers to his temple. "There are so many counts upon which you sound like complete idiot at the moment."

"So…" said Jane, suddenly finding herself more curious than angry, "what are those counts?"

Loki cracked one eyelid open and peered at Jane. He raised an eyebrow. "You truly have no idea why you came here." It was as much a realization as it was a statement.

Jane opened her mouth and frowned. Lost for words again. Fantastic. "Just…" she began. "Oh… Whatever. Just tell me why I'm an 'idiot.'"

The demigod let his eye fall closed. "Firstly: for a woman of science, your perceptions of Asgardian physiology are inane. Midgardians seek medical aid for broken bones not because the bones won't ever heal themselves – but because they won't heal _properly_. Admittedly, Asgardians knit themselves together more efficiently than humans – it's one of the many, many ways in which we are superior. However, any Asgardian would be foolish not to accept ministrations."

"And your own magic?" pried Jane. "That means nothing?"

Loki sniffed in contempt. "Midgardians and their pathetic, blind infatuation with magic. You are all so quick to worship what you cannot comprehend." A cough suddenly ripped through his frame and he braced himself against it. "True magic isn't pointed twigs and little vials of mysterious liquid and moronic incantations," he said, his voice hoarse. "It's a manipulation of the elements, of time and space – and it takes _centuries_ to master."

"So if you know so much about using magic, why can't you do it now?"

Loki clamped his jaw. "_Must_ you ask such banal questions?" Jane just sat there. She was learning that patience was her best defense. Loki, seeing her game, rolled his eyes and continued. "I am gravely injured, without food or water, and locked in an anti-forcefield tube – all in addition to the fact that the All-Father, upon learning of my arrest, stripped me of any inherent magical abilities. I'm left to pull magic from the scant elemental resources in this cell."

"Which can't be much," said Jane. Why was she starting to feel oddly conversational with him? She made a mental note of it and kept talking. "Your father must not be happy –"

"_He is not my father,_" barked the demigod, his entire body suddenly rigid and shaking. His eyes blazed. His voice climbed to a violent shout. "Just as Thor is not my brother, never was and _never_ will be. How _dare_ you utter such foul presumption! Shut your gaping maw now and shut it tight, you vile trull–"

Loki didn't get much farther with the barrage. Jane looked on in horror and disgust and some odd form of remorse as yet another fit of coughing clamped the prisoner's entire torso. Jane's eyes welled up despite her best efforts at composure; she stared into space through her tears as Loki coughed. Each hack ripped through Jane and reminded her that in spite of her own personal pain, there were centuries of others' pain that mattered so much more. How could she possibly hope to overcome her own struggles when the very gods that humans worshipped were equally damaged? And so they both suffered, alone and together, for almost ninety seconds.

When he had finally finished convulsing, Loki laid back slowly and shakily against the hard surface of the lounge. He kept his arms wrapped firmly around his waist, as though he was trying to keep something inside of himself from falling apart. Each breath was a ragged wheeze. Jane had never seen a corpse look as pale as the demigod did now.

"Put it back on" he rasped. "We're done."

Jane blinked and blinked again through her tears. So that was it, her interaction with one of the most influential forces in her life: over. She thought he had owed her so much, thought she had known exactly how to get what she needed from the interaction; now, everything about the fallen Asgardian bewildered her. She opened her mouth to say something else but nothing came. For now there was nothing left to say, to do. She averted her eyes from the glass and quietly pressed the red button. She could hear the whir and click of the muzzle as it crawled back over Loki's mouth. She never looked up at him as she turned to leave.

Jane was still crying when the elevator door closed. She pushed the "Up" button even though "Emergency," she thought through the haze of her helplessness, would have been so much more fitting.

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**Perplexed? Intrigued? Wondering if Jane will return to the cell? **

**A Loki POV chapter is on the way to illuminate things a bit! Stay tuned!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Ooo Chapter 3, everyone! Loki POV! Exciting stuff.**

**Some special thanks are in order to my visitors and - of course - to my lovely reviewers. You guys make me feel like a rockstar.**

**I had so much fun writing this chapter. So much. Loki's brain is just so interesting.  
**

**Enjoy!**

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Loki counted time on the thuds in his aching skull.

That he was forced to use his throbbing head as a boredom deterrent said quite a bit about the banality of his cell. Midgardian punishment, he thought through the pain, was staggeringly unimaginative. Everything around him was glass and metal, sleek in the same pointless way that all human 'technology' was sleek. High, rounded glass walls. Cleverly hidden and scathingly bright white lights. A metal lounge that rivaled Jotunheim in iciness and rigidity. It was a cage meant to impress as much as it was meant to contain; it didn't do the former and barely did the latter. Loki felt a perverse excitement at the thought of his upcoming Asgardian punishment - the thrill of a true test of strength. He inwardly shuddered imagining the spectacle, the grotesque beauty of the instruments, the fascinatingly comprehensive pain only magic could inflict. And the most thrillingly agonizing punishment of all: the nauseating pity in Thor's eyes as the blonde god watched. The god of thunder would so desperately, foolishly want to help the Jotun prince. Loki looked forward to returning the sentiment – ah, sentiment – by snarling at Thor through his bonds. Nothing inspired and cultivated pain quite like rebuking another's love with hatred. And Loki was expertly skilled in that regard.

Imbecilic humans, he mused. Assuming physical pain to be the most fitting form of discipline.

Loki had spent enough time in the grips of physical pain over the centuries to know that it was almost always more annoying and puzzling than debilitating. It did not inflict further physical damage, unless one counted any unconsciousness it provoked. It was in reality a useful signal, a tool for interpreting and repairing infliction.

The Chitauri had been wise and relentless tutors in pain. They'd manipulated his organs, warped his skin, churned his mind to a frothy pulp, repaired the damage and began anew until he'd learned to think and act through it all. It had been their goal to craft an ambassador who could not only withstand pain, but also _wield_ pain as its own weapon. At first he had not respected that goal; he had been a little, wounded princeling, a selfish whelp whose mind was clouded by the very bane of free thinking – sentiment.

And how strangely beautiful of the Chitauri to have used pain to demystify the path to higher thought. Unfortunately, they were oafs on the field of battle, but for all that their brand of endurance was rare. Loki had emerged from his "training" with magical abilities he could never have attained, with foresight of which he could never have conceived. Despite the Chitauris' many incompetencies, Loki knew he would have been dead without them.

It was without them that he now reclined in this glassy tomb, mind restless and body burning. He let himself dwell extensively on his myriad physical ailments. Broken bones: five in his left foot and ankle, his right heel, a fracture in his right femur, another on the left side of his pelvis just above his hip. Every rib had sustained some form of damage. His hands, luckily, were only badly bruised and strained. One collarbone had snapped clean in two, and there was a long, slim fracture that began at the base of his skull and ran diagonally across to his right temple. Internal injuries: he could feel the glass-shard sharpness of a rib prodding his left lung with every movement. There was a unique sickly runniness in his head that suggested some form of bleeding. His abdomen was a wondrous tapestry of cramps and aches, beginning just beneath the skin and boring deep to his core. He almost laughed aloud to consider the softness and vulnerability of the area from his solar plexus to his hips: it practically offered itself up to be broken.

And then, an almost entirely new sensation – not painful, per se, but certainly distressing. Loki supposed it was what humans identified as a "fever": complete exhaustion, lightheadedness, sweating and shivering all bunched into a lovely bouquet of misery. It was, as far as he could ascertain, a completely Midgardian phenomenon. Immortal and nearly-immortal bodies were built with more sophisticated immune systems – immune systems that did not cause the victim any additional anguish as they banished infection. Loki could only assume the removal of his magical abilities had introduced his body to this new brand of suffering.

Despite the great toll Banner had taken on his physical form, however, Loki remained vigilant, perceptual, aware. Judging by the extent of his injuries and illness, Loki reasoned that any human would have been dead on impact in Stark Tower. And any Asgardian would have been babbling in delirium by this point. But Loki knew how to harness magic from the tiniest, most obscure pockets of the prison's atmosphere. He knew how to concentrate and meditate and repeat mantras unknown to any other living creature. He was immensely powerful, supremely masterful, razor-sharp and impressively collected. He thought he knew, thanks to the Chitauri, exactly how to stay sane.

So it had been sickeningly infuriating to feel all of that discipline slip in the presence of a tiny mortal woman.

Jane Foster. Thor's shrewish little infatuation. That simpering scrap of feminine flesh. She had scampered into his glass sanctuary and broken his precious concentration with her blubbering. He had been mercifully able to ignore her and keep his eyes shut until her hitching sobs had started. Something about those tears – those idiotic, senseless human tears – had slashed the weeks of Chitaurian pain conditioning from his brain. Agony had crashed into his head and stomach like a nuclear blast. It had been all he could do not to lose his mind in the rubble of unspeakable pain right then and there.

And then she had unclamped the mouthpiece. An outlet for his imminent insanity had presented itself and he'd panicked, mind flailing – and sang. He sang a pointless Midgardian shanty he'd heard in his cell the day before when the prison's intercom wiring had picked up interference from a private jet. As he sang, he felt ridiculous, simple, helpless. Singing that preposterous number had been the first time since he had set foot on Midgardian soil that he had felt, truly and deeply, _defeated_. "Sympathy for the Devil," he realized, had been coincidentally fitting for his situation. Although he certainly hadn't desired any actual sympathy from Jane Foster.

Still, sympathy was something she had almost given him. Jane had almost, _almost_ pitied him; coming from her, Loki had thought it more strange than irksome. She had seen him suffer, had offered condolence, had felt confused, had become frightened and had run away. Granted, her reaction was indicative of Loki's usual track record with women – something he rarely dwelled on. But Jane was a _human_ woman. Humans harbored far too much collective animosity towards him to ever offer him sympathy or company. (Humans likely found him repugnant even outside of the whole "destruction of New York City" incident. Loki hadn't the faintest idea how humans had figured out that he had given birth to a snake and horse and other oddities, but he was certain that it didn't make him any more approachable). Besides, he had finished thinking sexually at all after his experience with the Chitauri. Reproduction was ultimately wasteful, especially if it meant he would help bring a demigod as abused as himself into the universe. Some part of him didn't want any more pain for whatever hapless progeny he might conceive.

Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Loki knew it kept his world spinning. Pain was the center of his universe, and he had tried to hide from it. Speaking to Jane Foster, he had internally acknowledged that no one being could run from suffering forever. That discovery had made him extraordinarily angry – but it had also offered a peculiar relief. One interaction with one human female, and he had finally begun to feel a bit more like himself. Not like himself, the "rightful king" of Asgard, the would-be conqueror of Earth. Himself: the lost Asgardian prince, the pedantic, proud introvert who wanted some living thing of importance to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But that version of himself was long gone, a scrap lost in the wind. Loki felt the change in his aching bones, knew he needed to move forward. Thus, Jane Foster's presence was potentially the most irritating obstacle he'd ever faced.

His interaction with Jane had presented him with a challenge: find out how to forget about this woman, if only by virtue of knowing everything he possibly could about her. Who was this tidbit of a Midgardian? Why had she blindly confronted him after he had essentially ruined her livelihood? And how had she managed to make him feel so, so miserable?

So so so _so_ _so_ miserable. So miserable, in fact, that gray dots were beginning to swarm his vision. And so... So... So suddenly there was nothing left to dwell on for the time being. In his final moments of fleeting consciousness Loki fixed his bleary eyes on the silver elevator doors outside the glass in front of him. His head throbbing, his stomach and ribs and extremities filled with aches, Loki finally let himself drift off to sleep.

And he remained sleeping until he heard the elevator doors open the next day.

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**Cliffhanger. I know. I apologize...? No, I don't apologize.**

**Review if you like what you see! Even a smilie face helps.**

**Thanks, all!**


	4. Chapter 4

**Oh you guys.**

**First of all, my visitors and reviewers are my life force. Thank you all so much! **

**Second, this chapter. There is an OC in it. He will only ever have cameo appearances. If you're confused at first about why he's there, all will become (somewhat) clear by the end of the chap.**

**Read on, read on, read on!**

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Jane woke the morning after her meeting with Loki feeling hungover. A fuzzy thickness had settled between her eyes and her mouth felt like it was made of construction paper. She wiped a thin layer of sweat from her temple with the corner of the bed sheet and rolled over. Garrett was lying next to her, facing her, on his side, still sleeping. His sandy brown curls were disheveled, his dark eyelashes cast little shadows on his cheeks. It was the same way Jane had seen him every morning for months now. That was the routine in her room at the SHIELD bunker: wake up, roll over, poke Garrett, make breakfast.

So why had she been surprised by his presence today? Jane had woken up on this one morning out of dozens, and rolled over fully expecting Garrett _not_ to be by her side.

Jane sat up and worried her lower lip with her teeth. Her face felt flushed and slow. There was something funny going on; she must have drunk some wine in the dead of the night without remembering. Taking pains not to wake Garrett, she rolled her legs over the side of the bed and tiptoed across the granite floor to the gray cabinets in her kitchenette. She groped in the relative darkness for the cabinet over the stove, opened it, examined its contents. All of her bottles of wine were unopened, untouched. Gathering dust, actually. Did she even have a corkscrew? Suddenly she could hardly remember the contents of her own kitchen.

She sat down at her folding table and ran both her hands through her hair. Agitation flickered in her chest like a lightbulb sputtering in a rusty electrical socket. She looked up and a little gasp snagged her breath: Garrett was still in her bed. But no, _no_, he'd been there every morning for months - _months!_ It was the second time in _ten minutes_ that the sight of Garrett in her bed had shocked her. Jane struggled to even out her breathing. She flattened her palms on the metal surface of the table - the cold, sterile, rigid-

"We're done," a deep voice rasped directly in Jane's ear.

Jane shrieked and flung herself up out of her folding chair, whirling around, her hair whipping, her heartbeat flooding her ears. The chair jerked onto the ground with a resounding clattering bang. Garrett started awake and blinked at Jane, bleary eyed.

"Woah..." he said, his face scrunching up in concern the moment he saw Jane. "What are you-"

"Garrett," panted Jane, her eyes wild, her voice clogged and choked. "Garrett did you whisper in my ear just now." The question spilled out in the form of a rushed and delirious statement.

Garrett seemed doubly confused. "What are you talking about? I've been sleepi- _Jane?_"

Jane darted across the half-lit room, gasping, eyes fogging with tears, yanking on her boots and coat. She stumbled for the door and grabbed her cell phone from her nightstand. She quickly kissed a stupefied Garrett on the forehead and bolted out into the echoing bunker hallway. She swore she could Her hands were trembling uncontrollably, but somehow she managed to send Nick Fury a single text message as she ran:

"_It's Jane Foster. I need a helicopter. NOW._"

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A few hours later, Jane waved weakly to Fury as the prison's elevator doors hissed shut. She quickly shook her head, still feeling crazed. What had she just told the director to gain reentry to the viewing pod? Her short term memory was fried, frayed like the butt end of a busted telephone wire. Her eyes could only stay focused for a few moments before blurring, either with tears or simply because her brain felt as though it had shorted out. All Jane knew was that if there was an answer to her questions - a reason for her acute episode of panic - it was lying on a metal lounge in the middle of a glass room.

She pressed the button on the remote the second the doors slid open.

"You got in my head and I want to know how _this god damn second._"

It was Loki's turn to be surprised to find someone staring at him. He started awake on the lounge and immediately hissed in pain and doubled over, arms wrapped around his waist and eyes screwed shut.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he croaked through clenched teeth, attempting to sound nonchalant and failing miserably.

"No!" Jane heard herself shout. She was shouting? "No. _Not _good enough! You know what?" she yelled, feeling tears flood her vision, "You know what- _fuck_ you! Yes, fuck you! You fucked up my _entire life, asshole!" _Her hands were hot trembling fists. Pain grated down the center of her chest like rusty saw. "You destroyed my home, you almost killed your brother and then shut him away from me, you created the mess that got me locked in an underground goddam cage for months and then you whisper in my ear like a... Like a fucked up lunatic! Just, God just... Just..." She was sobbing. She wanted to throw herself through the glass and throttle him or slap him or beat him with his own mouthpiece but she just stood there crying.

"This isn't getting to be a habit, is it?" asked the demigod. He had vanished his restraints and was tenderly massaging his jaw with a bruised hand. "You, bursting through the doors and wailing? Because it's terribly unbecoming."

"Be quiet," said Jane. She looked down and wrung her hands together.

"Oh, so _that's _why you released my jaw from this gadget. So I could 'be quiet.' My mistake." Even in the stupor of her tears, Jane could tell there was something different about his voice from the last time they had spoken. It was almost... playful?

Mischievous. That was it.

"So you... didn't whisper 'We're done' in my ear this morning?" asked Jane. She wiped away the last of her tears with a loosening fist.

"Unless I'm mistaken," responded Loki, "I said that to you just before you left yesterday. What reason could I possibly have to wake from my perfectly tranquil slumber and remind you again that I wanted nothing more to do with you?"

Jane meant to scoff, "Oh, fuck you." But she couldn't finish the phrase. The words needled her own tongue like pricks of acid, even though they had been meant to wound the demigod.

Loki gingerly, gingerly laid back on the lounge with a shaky exhale. "Your language is a bit more colorful today," he said. "Surprising, really. Here I had guessed you were Thor's little spring lamb."

"Yeah," said Jane, looking off to the side, suddenly feeling herself blush, "well I guess the lamb turned into a lion. I've had kind of a shitty few months if you know what I mean."

"But it clearly wasn't all for naught, was it, Jane Foster?"

"What are you talking about?" asked Jane. It was only when she turned to look at him again that she saw his pale eyes were fixated on her left ring finger.

To be specific, the engagement ring on her left ring finger.

"Oh, this," she said faintly, acknowledging the jewelry. "This... This is complicated."

"Whatever it is," said Loki, wincing as he shifted a bit on the metal, "it certainly does _not_ mean you are betrothed to Thor."

"How do you know that?"

"Midgardian ignorance can be simply astounding," grumbled the demigod. He turned his eyes to the high ceiling. "Do you sincerely believe that Asgardian males toss little senseless baubles at women, as if to 'brand' them as their own before they claim them in matrimony? In Asgard women are not bought - they are _earned. _Thor would be a laughing stock if he wooed a woman with a puny trinket, let alone a human woman."

"Okay, so I am marrying a human man. And that's how it should be, right? 'One of my own kind?' " Jane's face burned. Loki had no business whatsoever in her personal life. She groped desperately for a way to end the conversation. "I know you're not _actually _Asgardian. So I bet you must have been a laughing stock up there too if you had to come mess around with Earth to get yourself off."

Loki's face instantly became six shades paler. He set his jaw, mottled with bruises, into a hard clench. Jane braced herself, fully expecting him to bellow until he'd hacked himself blue in the face. The air in the viewing pod thickened; Jane could almost _smell_ the silence like a gasp of ammonia.

The demigod inhaled slowly, air filling his broken chest beneath layers of formidable armor, and smiled. A slow, sickly, menacing grin stretched his lips back like taffy, revealing, for the first time since Jane had met him, a full set of perfect teeth. He dipped his head slightly and stared straight into her, his eyes like burning coals set in the embers of the dark circles beneath them.

"Oh Jane," Loki drawled, his voice slowed and deepened to a growl, "Jane, Jane, Jane..." He licked his cracked lips. "To think that infantile, imbecilic emotion played whatsoever into my actions against your lowly planet is a grievous, grievous error." He spoke so deliberately that Jane could hear the malice dripping from every word like the wax from a candle made of clotted blood. "Perhaps someday, when you have had your brains slurped out through your eye sockets, and your guts wrapped round your neck like a noose, and your spinal column yanked out vertebrae by vertebrae starting with your tailbone, and the creatures doing those things to you demand that you acquire a little territory for them - maybe then, you will think about following the orders you're given, and - how did you phrase it? - 'mess around with Earth'. If I had wanted to derive any emotional catharsis from the experience, I would have asked that the Chitauri condition me to just _relish_ being beaten senseless."

Jane stood frozen, paralyzed. Her innards were sculpted of ice and her head filled with static. She knew, then and there, feet planted in the pasty-bright cell, that this was all wrong. This... mythological demigod in a stupid human cage, in a ridiculous human facility, when he had _lived_ the Hell that humans most feared. His story, his suffering, his fate - none of it was meant for people of Earth to tamper with. She finally understood what Loki had meant by "Asgardian protection." The only other option for him was the Chitauri. If he fell into their hands he would go on for centuries - _centuries -_ being mauled and repaired and mauled and repaired and mauled, and the only thing he would have to show for it was a little damaged Midgardian city. Loki shouldn't have been Earth's problem. And Earth should not have been his problem either.

"It's all messed up." Jane's ears perked up at the sound of her own voice; she realized too late that she'd spoken those four words aloud.

"So it is, Jane Foster," replied Loki, his voice surprisingly calm. He closed his eyes, grimacing. He wrapped his arms back around his middle and tilted his head away from her, almost like a bizarre swan tucking its head under its arm.

Jane didn't know why she was there any more. Why she had bothered to get on the helicopter and leave behind her confused fiancé to visit someone she could not help.

Wait - help? Help? Jane's mind reeled. She looked at the wounded prisoner, at her engagement ring, at the ceiling, back at Loki. Dear god, she thought, for whatever reason, _I want to help him. _

Loki spoke again without facing her. "In all likelihood you are blubbering again at the moment. So I will refrain from embarrassing us both by not addressing you directly." Jane saw a slight shiver run through his bones. "I will say: these conversations with you have been the most aggravating things I've ever faced, for reasons that you may never comprehend. I believe that you, Jane Foster, are unlike any human I've ever encountered, and while I cannot decide whether that is a blessing or a curse, I know it's a thought that will unfortunately nag at my brain tomorrow as I return with Thor to Asgard. Whatever you intended on accomplishing by coming here, congratulations..." He turned his head up ever so slightly. "You have managed to gain and hold my attention."

Jane was trying her best to stifle the sound of her sobs. This was all so incredibly confusing. She felt completely, utterly lost. And the thing that made her position all the more strange was that she wanted the armored form on the metal lounge to somehow... come find her.

"Now I believe," said Loki, his voice becoming dangerously sleepy, "we truly are done."

* * *

Jane handed the remote to Nick Fury as she left. Rain spattered the tarmac and oozed through her light jacket.

"I'm sorry I wasted your time, sir. I never want to see or use this thing again, and I mean it."

But Jane knew that was a lie.

* * *

**The cliffhanger strikes again.**

**So Loki will go back to Asgard tomorrow (in the context of the story that is). Or will he...?**

**What say you? Still with me?**

**Thanks again everyone!**


	5. Author Note: Jane

**Well, here we are, folks! Another day, another chapter coming soon! This one is going to clear up a lot of potential questions about this Garrett guy. It will also let you know what the plan is going to be with Asgard etc.**

**Before I post (which will be, I promise, soon), I want to address a really spot-on reviewer concern from Ione about the believability (or maybe believability is the wrong word - tangibility?) of Jane in my writing. I gotta say, Ione, you really struck the heart of all of my _own_ trepidations about this piece. The best response I can give you is this: I will be the first to admit that Jane is incredibly hard for me to write. And here's why:**

**First of all, Jane is _such _a straightwoman in "Thor," having to sidle up against the incredibly colorful Asgardians and all of Darcy's quirks. Be that as it may, Jane also has moments of startling uniqueness: she's a scientist, and yet she's superstitious. She's altruistic, but is also self-serving in that she's got stuff to say and she wants the world to hear it. She's ultimately very concerned with fairness: it's not fair that SHIELD takes her equipment, it's not fair that Loki's destroyer can nearly kill Thor with one blow. And she's very, very impressionable, but there's a sort of intuition that guides how vulnerable she chooses to let herself become. She lets Thor into her life very easily, but she fights against the SHIELD team. And she's very emotional: because Natalie Portman tends to cry a lot in her films, Jane as a result cries a lot.**

**So there's all that to work with. It can get messy. Add to it now the fact that Whedon gave us _nothing_ of Jane in "The Avengers." Pretty much just a picture of her face, smiling sadly into the distance. Compare that nonexistent characterization to what we see from Loki, who has, in my opinion, changed somewhat radically since "Thor." His time with the Chitauri has given him this hardness and confidence that was far more subdued during most of "Thor." (Recall that in the climactic scene between Loki and Odin, Loki actually weeps. If you compare that scene to, say, his conversation with Black Widow in "Avengers," it's practically emotional apples to oranges. Or apples to apples-with-a-thick-orangey-exterior). So my point is: I have to somehow account for a lot that we're missing from what must have been a turbulent time in Jane's life.**

**Now let me justify what I'm trying to do with Jane to fill that gap between "Thor" and the end of "Avengers." I'm imagining, with this story, a world in which Jane underwent a long stay in a very depressing and pent-up place. Shut up beneath the earth, she probably has begun to question whether the things she wanted to say to the world matter anymore. She probably has heard a lot of men speak a lot of obscenities on a daily basis. Her emotional volatility is probably dialed up quite a bit: she's on edge, antsy, helpless, wanting to do what is right so that was is _fair_ can happen. And Loki is the most unfair, wrong, puzzling thing she's ever had to deal with. Her superstitions are telling her to listen to him a little, but her moral code and her love for her friends hold her back. She really starts to dislike being in her own head, I think, and wants to burst out at someone or to someone or about something. Loki's dangerous, and passionate, and that draws her in a way that is disturbing to her. And for now that's all she knows.**

**So given _all that_, I just don't think I can write the Jane that we saw in "Thor." But I'm also trying to be very careful, and trust myself, and bring elements of that Jane over to my work. Part of what makes fanfic so fun is imagining these radical or unexplored situations for the characters we all know and love. I think trying to jump a _big_ time gap with Jane is super challenging. I want to keep hearing all your feedback! The reviews really give me a sense of where readers outside of myself aren't connecting.**

**Thanks everyone!**


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter five y'all.**

**Before you skin me alive - Loki is only in the end of this chapter. But important stuff happens, people! Jane couldn't go on forever without touching base with Thor. And Thor will, as you'll see, have a vital function in coming events. This chapter is a turning point and a _big_ one.**

**So begins the love trapezoid: Thor, Loki and Garrett will all play / have played some romantic function for Jane by the end of this story. (But don't worry. I can tell you now, Loki will win out by the end). For those of you still confused about Garrett, patience. Patience.**

**Thanks to my incredibly insightful reviewers. You are all a wealth of wise words, and a really great objective eye. **

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Jane was standing in front of the god of thunder in a conference room at SHIELD headquarters. She had asked Fury for a final jet, a final meeting – the reunion with Thor that Fury had originally offered her. The room was cold, dark and rigid, but a pale golden light seemed to emanate from the demigod's form – as though he were a giant golden nightlight, warm and familiar.

"Hello, Lady Jane" said Thor, his voice as deep and gruff and majestic as ever. He was doing a very poor job of concealing a _very_ dashing grin.

Jane took one look at the blonde god and was seized by an abrupt urge to kiss him. What had gotten _into_ her? One gorgeous guy – well, _god_ – and her chest fluttered like a caffeinated hummingbird. Habits, she knew, died hard. There was a part of her that knew she was being silly, knew this was exactly how she had felt when Thor had first fallen into that New Mexican desert. Yes, they had become close. And yes, she had thought for a while that this windswept gentleman from a far-off realm could actually be a perfect match for her. But her time in the bunker, immersed in hard science to the point of questioning her own self, had wrenched her fantasies from her. To kiss him now, after... everything – not only would it be wildly inappropriate, but it would also feel somehow wrong, displaced. Like kissing a photograph, or an illustration in a big storybook. He simply wasn't meant for her. Even standing as close to her as he was now, in a meeting room at SHIELD headquarters, he seemed far away and fleeting, as if a flash of lightning could take him back across the light years in an instant.

But still, there he was. Hulking and formidable, his lion's mane of straw-blonde hair framing his bronze stubble and blue eyes, the corners of which crinkled as he smiled.

"Such terrible things have happened since we said goodbye," said Thor, clasping his hands in front of him, beaming. "I must say, it is a magnificent relief to see your face again."

He was so sincere that Jane was almost in tears again. She couldn't decide whether to smile or give Thor an awkward hug or just nod. She felt small and embarrassed, as though she had run into a well-meaning college ex-sweetheart.

"I... missed you," she said, looking at her feet. It was true: he was the first familiar face she had seen in weeks and weeks. Well, besides Garrett.

"If you would like to begin… where we left off, you and I," chanced Thor, rocking back on his heels a bit, "it would be my distinct pleasure to ferry you to a new food establishment that Mr. Stark introduced to me – I believe it was called 'schmeerma.' "

"Uhm, I think it's actually schawarma," corrected Jane, feeling her voice get smaller. "And… there's something I should tell you."

Thor just smiled at her. If the demigod had a tail, it would be wagging. Jane sighed; his infectiousness really could make things difficult.

"I'm… engaged," said Jane flatly. She lowered he head and peered up at Thor, waiting to see his face fall.

"Glorious!" bellowed Thor. Jane couldn't believe her ears for a moment. She looked up to see the god laughing heartily. "Jane Foster, engaged in a battle to the death! I had no idea that Midgardians counted _dueling_ among their many sporting events!"

Jane blushed tremendously. She couldn't decide whether she found Thor's ignorance charming or depressing. (And Loki had said that _Mid_gardians were thick skulled). But how could she fault Thor and his contagious laughter and his blue eyes and his boundless enthusiasm? He was just so…

"I mean, I'm engaged to be _married_," said Jane, almost whispering. "Um… 'betrothed.'"

"Oh," said Thor. There, there was the fallen face Jane had expected. Thor's brow furrowed and he cleared his throat, attempting some sort of bravado. "Oh. Did I… Did I do anything to upset you, Lady Jane?"

"No!" Jane said quickly. She felt her throat constrict as she launched into the inevitable explanation. "No– it's just… I didn't know whether you would come back after the… bridge incident. And SHIELD offered me a chance to study with them, in a very remote location. And that all went wrong, except… I met a man at the lab. A human man. Things were really dark, literally and metaphorically, and kind of hopeless down there, and we were both really attracted to each other, and we thought, this could be a real shot at happiness for us… A chance for something safe in a really unfamiliar place, something normal…" Her eyes scrunched up when she heard the word "normal" roll off her dry tongue. Where had her belief in fairytales gone? Why did she have to have changed so much since she drove Thor out to the desert in the dead of the night to fetch his hammer from the SHIELD encampment? That had been exciting, new, fantastical, fresh, _different_. Now she hunkered beneath the Earth, engaged to a man with classic good looks who never questioned her.

Thor, too, noticed she had changed. He shook his head, a rueful smile painted on his face. "You have less _faith_ than before, Jane. It worries me."

"I think there are more important things to be worried about right now…" said Jane, trying awkwardly to segue into the true purpose of the meeting. Her heartbeat thrummed against the bones deep in her ears.

Thor frowned curiously down at her and crossed his muscled arms across his broad chest. Jane took a deep, _deep_ shaky breath that burned its way through her throat. "I met with… With your brother," she said weakly. "And… I couldn't fully understand a lot of what he said to me, but I think I know… I know that Loki _cannot_ go back to Asgard."

Thor had snapped his strong jaw tightly shut. Jane had forgotten how foreboding he could look: he was a far-off roll of thunder, personified.

"Jane," he said, voice taught, "while I respect you dearly, I will say to you that you do not know everything about the Tessaract. Not even most Asgardians know much, to be certain. But I can assure you it possesses the power to get my brother away from Earth, out of harm's way."

"No, no–" said Jane, shaking her swimming head. "I know that Loki is _capable_ of returning to Asgard. What I'm saying is… I don't think he _should_ go back."

"I don't understand," said Thor. "When Loki returns to Asgard, not only will Midgard be free from any threat of his, but he will also receive proper treatment for the wounds I know he must have. Our father is a just and honorable man. Loki has earned Asgardian punishment, but I believe, as the All-Father believes, that there is hope for him yet."

"I don't know about that. He's been through a lot." Jane couldn't tell whether or not she was defending Loki. She imagined him biding his time in his sterile glass cage, hurt and angry

"How much did you speak with him?" Thor's brows knit closer together and his voice became sandpaper-rough. "Wounded as he may be, he is still powerful, Jane. Still dangerous. We were raised together, fought enemies together: I've seen the sort of magic he is capable of." Thor's expression softened almost imperceptibly. In a flashflood of thought, Jane suddenly realized: Thor harbored _admiration_ towards his estranged sibling.

"Exactly," said Jane. She'd seen Thor's Achilles heel, the loyalty to Loki held within the tiniest, deepest synapses of his brain. "His magic," Jane continued, "is... It's become something that I don't think even Asgard could understand, let alone Earth."

"Jane, you cannot know much about Asgardian magic, or Jotun magic, or whatever magic Loki uses. It could not be more complex than the Tessaract-"

"It is more complex."

"Jane, that is a wild, wild assumption. How could you possibly know that?"

"Because Loki can't even control it himself," said Jane. She hadn't even realized the full implications of her discovery until she'd spoken it aloud. Now her hands shook as she spoke. "He contacted me... telepathically... yesterday morning. And I went to his cell to demand why, and he had been sleeping the whole night and morning. I mean, really sleeping, like dead out. He said he didn't remember anything..."

"You _must_ know how often he lies, Jane." Thor had begun pacing the floor of he meeting room in frustration, cape fluttering behind him. "He could have some malicious purpose for you that you could not conceive of. He never took kindly to my infatuation with you."

"So it was only an infatuation," murmured Jane, just loud enough for Thor to hear. Her mind was watery. "Never mind, forget I said that, just..." She tried to wind her brain back up but it felt loose, strange. She took a deep breath through her panic and slowed her words. "Loki should not go back to Asgard because what the Chitauri may have done to him could endanger everyone. Not just you, or me, or even Loki himself. All of Asgard. All of Earth. That's what we stand to lose and Nick Fury doesn't see it!"

"So what are you saying, Jane? That he is better off here on Earth, a planet he has harmed before? That he should run from our father, who is depending on me to bring him home? None of this makes any sense!"

Jane wrung her hands out like wet towels. "I just- I want to spend some time with him- try to get to know what's going on in his head. I don't know, maybe I'm going crazy, just... I just have this... this feeling about it, that it's somehow the right thing to do."

"Faith," said Thor with a small smile. He had stopped pacing. He eyes lit up.

"Yeah... Yeah..." said Jane hesitantly. She nodded, feeling things click into place in her head. "Faith."

Jane didn't know where to go from here. Her legs were shaking and little bitter pangs shot through her chest. Thor was actually prepared to grant her wish. She knew that she could stand here forever talking about "saving the world" with Thor, as though she herself was an Avenger – but none of it would make a difference unless she acted on her words. But talk about 'easier said than done': "action" involved harboring a fugitive who embodied untrustworthiness, who could escape almost any containment, who had a very famous mean streak...

A fugitive to whom Jane felt strongly, ironically attached. It wasn't lust... It certainly wasn't love- it was... affinity. Chemistry. She felt as though if something bad happened to Loki, it would happen to her as well. Jane had made up her mind. Her heart raced.

"How will you take him back to Asgard today?" she asked.

Thor still looked wary. "The Tessaract, I presume. We hold it, Odin channels its power to take us home."

"Give Loki permission to use his magic on it."

"What-?"

"Tell him to override it somehow – override Odin's pull – and take the both of you to..." she snapped her fingers. "To my lab in New Mexico!"

"The destroyed, abandoned lab?"

"I don't think they'll look for us there," said Jane, her eyes dancing. "We'll hide in plain sight!"

"And by 'they,'" said Thor, "I assume you mean..."

"Everyone," said Jane. She knew who harebrained the plan was, knew how crazy it sounded spilling from her lips. But this was _her_ chance! Her chance to be in the action, to really _learn _something that would be _her_ own, that she wouldn't have to hand over to SHIELD, that would have a direct impact on her life. She felt, for the first time since taking Thor to fetch his hammer, the keening thrill of fresh excitement.

As if he had read her mind, Thor posited, "You are doing this for the right reasons, Jane?"

Jane bit her lip. She was confused as to what the right reasons might be in this situation. She nodded. "Yes... Thank you," she said and looked up into Thor's eyes, little tears misting her own.

"Alright, then," said Thor, letting out a deep breath. "Tomorrow I defy my father's word and take my sad, deranged brother to an abandoned Midgardian science facility – all for the lovely Jane Foster." He was sarcastic but smiling.

"Yes," said Jane with a laugh, "that's about it. I'll meet you guys there somehow, don't worry about me."

"Splendid," said Thor. He looked around the room, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Jane, I do have one more question for you."

"Sure," said Jane, nervous. She knew what the question might be. Something about Loki – something about the way he'd looked at her and why she had felt her breath leave her body when he spoke and-

"What is his name?" asked Thor. "The Midgardian man you are to marry?"

Oh... oh.

"Garrett," said Jane, blushing. "His name... His name is Garrett."

* * *

Loki stepped onto the stone veranda in the scathingly bright midday sun. Every step was sharp, cruel agony. Stabs of pain shot from the broken bones in his feet and legs, up through his bruised and bloodied abdomen, down the shaft of each cracked rib, and into his splintered skull. He drew stiff, steady breaths through his scabbed nose, focusing every last tendril of power and magic on appearing completely controlled, commanding, potent, threatening. He clung to his image like a cliff face; none of the smug, smirking little "superheros" were allowed to see through the cracks in his aching body – especially not Banner.

He could disappear in a wink. He knew it, and he knew Thor knew it. The real disappearing act, however, would come momentarily. Loki was bracing every fiber of his being in preparation – he probed within himself. Despite the comprehensive damage to his body, every nerve was a steel trap, reflexes primed, springs coiled.

This was his chance to _truly_ escape.

For whatever reason, Thor had given him an out, had told him about a plan to remove him from the justice system permanently. It had been a very strange proposal coming from Thor, who never disobeyed Odin unless... well, unless Loki himself told him to. It would have been worlds easier to escape without dragging Thor along. But Loki knew that, unfortunately, he could not escape alone. He would expend the last of his temporary energy stores in the jump through space and become, essentially, an invalid upon arriving at his destination. Thor had assured him that the bizarre Jane Foster would be there waiting for them, to offer help and shelter. Needless to say, Loki wasn't jumping for joy about it, but she seemed like a proactive and practical woman and that was something he would need. Loki was not a beggar, but he was certainly in no position to be a chooser. Injured and almost powerless, Loki knew it was time for a last resort.

Thor lifted the Tessaract. His face was stern, reprimanding – scared. Loki allowed himself a grin underneath his mouthpiece; the blonde god's fear was almost nourishing, a sign that Loki still held true power over Asgard's king-to-be. Suddenly Loki felt a weird pang of – what _was_ that, regret? – gnaw at his gut, but he pushed it back, sneering...

And grabbed the glowing Tessaract.

* * *

Nick Fury watched the two demigods disappear in a flash of blue. He took a sip of his drink, set it down and turned to the council members on the screens behind him.

"That's that," he said with a nod. He walked out the door and said under his breath:

"Good riddance."

* * *

**I think I'll try to have one more chapter up today! That would be awesome, would it not?**

**Review if ya like what ya see! Thanks all!**


	7. Chapter 6

**Heyyyy two chapters in one day! (Well, sort of. One AM US central time is still technically nighttime of the day before).**

**Sometimes I'm really seized by this impossible urge to write a songfic. I never follow up on it because, well… Meh. I worry it'd be stilted.**

**But IF this were a songfic the first song would be Ramona Falls: "Brevony." Go listen to it.**

**So we're at a hectic junction here. Thor and Loki are going to New Mexico. Jane will meet them there somehow. I gotta admit I was a bit tempted to cop out: "Jane got to New Mexico – how she had managed to escape the SHIELD bunker was unknown even to her!" But I owe you guys more than that. Fair warning: I'm gonna move away from canon plot because, well, there's no more canon plot left to follow at this point.**

**So here, without further ado, is this crazy chapter:**

* * *

Jane sighed as Garrett rolled off of her in bed. There was something so bittersweet and so wonderful, she thought, about being intimate with someone for the last time.

Except she hadn't quite broken the whole "last time" thing to Garrett just yet.

Jane rolled onto her side and took a good look at him. His skin was bronzed, even though the SHIELD employees had been without sun for months. She supposed it was genetic. His face was broad and angular, framed by dark curls. His eyes were as brown as her own. His lips were thin and his smile kind, unassuming. He had always made her feel safe, had always been a shoulder to lean on. When he had proposed to her, he had confessed that she made him feel safe as well. In the strangeness and uncertainty of the labs, Garrett had always been across the room, shooting Jane affectionate glances and winks. Moving in together had been so natural. _Loving_ one another had been so natural.

It felt odd then, that leaving him now could be so effortless. Somewhere in her heart, Jane knew that Garrett wouldn't take anything the wrong way – _couldn't_ take anything the wrong way. They had always been honest with one another, and Jane believed this would be no different. She reached out a hand to touch Garrett's hair, but thought the moment might be too serious for that and pulled back.

"I have to go," she said.

Garrett chuckled, "Ah, really? The sex was _that_ bad?"

Jane couldn't help but smile. "No, no it was… it was great, as always. _You're_ great, it's just- I can't stay here forever. There are people outside of this place who need my help right now. Friends and family of mine who were hurt in New York," she lied. So much for honesty.

"Well…" said Garrett. "I just don't think it's that easy to leave here, hon. I mean, it's not really a place where people come and go as they please."

"I don't… need you to fully understand why I want to leave," said Jane, reaching out to touch his arm. "But please… know that it's something I _have_ to do. I don't have any other option."

"Well aren't you mysterious," said Garrett. His dark eyes smiled. "Are you thirsty? You want a glass of- You know what, I'm gonna get a glass of water cause I don't know about you, but I'm thirsty." He pulled away from Jane, quickly got out of bed, and made his way over to the cupboard above the fridge. There was something wrong with him, Jane thought. Normally he didn't skirt issues, didn't mask his feelings by thinking of mundane tasks to do instead of talking.

Jane let Garrett rummage around in the cupboard for a bit. She got up and picked her clothes off the floor, piece by piece, and got dressed. Garrett remained silent.

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry if you're feeling really bad about this," said Jane. "You know, it doesn't mean that we won't be engaged anymore. It's not like that. It's not like I won't ever come back, either."

No response. Jane began packing her overnight bag. She stole peeks at Garrett, who was still arranging things in the cabinet but there was something almost angry about the way he was shuffling glasses around. A deep frown shadowed his eyes and every moment jerked his arm.

"How do you think you're going to leave?" asked Garrett, his voice low and his words short and sharp. "Just hop on a bus? Call a taxi? Yeah, that'll work."

Jane stopped packing. "Hey, hey- calm down, ok? You're scaring me."

"There are dangerous people here, Jane," said Garrett, still rummaging, his voice trembling feverishly. "People who will try to stop you. What will you do then?"

Jane was starting to get officially angry. She stuffed clothing fiercely into her bag. "Let's just say I have help, ok? God, what is the _matter_ with you?"

"What's the matter with me?" said Garrett. "What's the _matter_ with me? I thought I _knew_ you, that's what! I thought we were engaged over here, but now you just wanna leave me behind, it's asinine!"

"Garrett..." said Jane helplessly, tearing up. She stood by the door with her entirely packed bag. Why was he berating her? What could she do? She felt like crumpling to the floor. "I'm sorry... I can explain later, I promise..." Every word sounded hollow, miserable. She thought she might tell him her reason for leaving, ached to tell him. It could only hurt matters though, for her, for Thor, for Loki. It had to be this way.

"I... I have to go now. I love you," said Jane as she turned away and opened the door.

"Sorry, Jane. But you're not going anywhere."

Garrett's voice was as serious as the grave. Jane stopped in the door and turned slowly around.

Garrett was crying, and pointing a gun at her head.

* * *

Thor's and Loki's feet slammed hard into the ground in the New Mexican desert. The god of thunder had just enough time to wipe the dust from his eyes before he saw Loki swaying dangerously. Thor clamored behind his brother and slipped his arms under him just as he started to fall.

"Clear your mind for a moment," Thor advised, making sure to keep his voice soft. He remained standing with his arms under Loki's shoulders, letting the paler god's back rest against his chest. "Do you think you can stand at all, brother?" Loki said nothing and Thor suddenly realized that he was still muzzled.

"Ah!" Thor said with a bark of laughter. "While it would be nice not to hear you insult me, it would probably be best to rid you of this." And with a small jerk of his brawny hand, Thor yanked the mouthpiece quite easily from Loki's face. "Now, what say you, brother?"

"Do you suppose," said Loki, his voice weak but clear and annoyed, his head lolling on his chest, his eyes closed, "that you could refrain from calling me that? And, to answer your question, no, I do not believe I can stand."

Thor sighed and lowered Loki to the brown, dry Earth. He sat down and propped Loki up so that the dark haired god's head rested in the blonde one's lap. Loki grimaced, wrapped one arm around his stomach and pressed the heel of the other hand to his temple. Thor supposed he was too worn out and injured to show any open signs of defiance. Loki quickly proved him wrong:

"Where's the wench?" he said. His voice was strained, his throat tensed against what must have been waves of pain. He squinted up at Thor, and his eyes were somehow glazed and piercing at the same time. "I thought you said... she would be here." Loki shook with a single cough and a tiny fleck of blood spotted his cracked lips. "Or is this Odin's new punishment, plopping me in a desert and leaving His High Oafishness to nurse me back to health?"

Thor shook his head and reached to brush a strand of black hair from Loki's fevered brow. The god of mischief groped his hand out to swat Thor's fingers away and hissed in pain at the movement.

"I know I may not be your ideal companion," said Thor. "But listen well, brother..."

"Stop-" said Loki, his eyes squeezed shut.

"I have helped you escape against all odds-"

"...calling me that."

"But I did not do it for your sake. When you are well, I shall have a bone to pick with you bigger than a Yotun frost mammoth's head." Thor looked at the sky, felt the breeze batter his stubbly beard. "I did this for Jane Foster."

Loki rolled his eyes. "Marvelous," he croaked. "When she arrives you can show her what a fantastic job you've done, because _you_ were clearly the one using magic to combat the Tessaract's programming, not I. And then Jane Foster can sit on your lap while you fondle her small breasts like trinkets won in one of your many 'glorious' battles. Just leave me out of it..." And with that final quip, Loki had talked himself to sleep. His head rested back on Thor's leg and his veins retreated back into the white flesh of his throat.

Thor could not help but grin. Perhaps Loki had not changed that gravely, after all. He certainly jested like his old self. Still, the god of thunder had never seen his brother so pallid and so weak. Certainly that meant nothing good.

He kept a steady eye on the horizon, and hoped Jane would arrive soon.

* * *

Jane stood aghast, eyes shifting wildly between the gun pointed at her face and the tears spilling down Garrett's cheeks.

"Garrett," she choked. "Garrett... honey please calm down." She put her shaking hands in the air, feeling so utterly strange as she did. She thought that any minute he might put the gun down and walk over and pull her close, like he had every evening after they'd walked home from the lab. This was insane! Who was this man - this man that Jane had slept with every night, had sex with, planned a future with?

"Why are you doing this?" begged Jane. It was the only thing she could think to say. The question burned like phosphorus in the space between her and the gun.

"Back at the beginning of all this," Garrett gestured everywhere with the gun but kept returning to aim it at Jane, "they... SHIELD... they told me to get close to you." He was trying to speak through sobs. "And stop you if you ever tried to leave. I hated myself _every single day,_ but you have to understand, Jane, that I still loved you. Still _do_ love you."

"Then _help me, don't point a gun at my face!_" cried Jane. She was starting to panic, see spots. "What is so hard about putting down a freaking gun that you're pointing at someone you love? _What?_"

Silence. She could only hear Garrett's sobs.

"_Tell me!_" Jane screamed.

Garrett took a moment to pull himself together, never letting the gun fall from his outstretched arm. He gasped in a shaky breath. "Because they said they would kill me too if I helped you."

Jane yanked her hands down from her face and wrenched the engagement ring from her finger. "I'm walking out of this room now," she sobbed. "I'm going to turn my back and walk out. So if you feel like shooting me, Garrett, you'll be shooting me in the back. Goodbye. I thought I loved you... I think I still do. Just... goodbye."

Jane slowly picked up her bag, spun around and ran from the room and into the hall as fast as she could.

Garrett never shot the gun.

* * *

**Yeah, I kinda ripped that "tell me" from "Thor." Parallels. Allusions. Ya know.**

**I also forgot how much I enjoyed reluctant bro chemistry between Thor and Loki. I think Thor's a good comic relief. Loki can be too, but in a different way. I may keep Thor around for a while. ;)**

**So how _does_ Jane finally get out of the SHIELD complex? Will she make it in time to help Loki?** **How much do Nick Fury and Odin know about all this?**

**Review and tune in next time, guys!**


	8. Chapter 7

**My most sincere apologies for not updating recently! Yesterday was a big... uh... "fun" day on my campus, so parties had to happen. Hah.**

**I might post two chapters today, though, so stay tuned! And thanks to everyone for your great enthusiasm for this story. It's been a fantastic journey so far.**

**Chapter 7!**

* * *

Heat – infernal, relentless, tormenting. Loki could feel waves of fire bathe his face, flames licking at the little cuts and bruises, washing over his limbs and burying deep in his gut. His mind reeled and spun in this fury of fumes and he reached out for a flicker of magic to bring him back to the edge of sanity. A tiny white spark in the corner of all the infernal blackness, and then nothing. No magic. No force. He summoned every bit of organic willpower he could muster and wrenched his eyes open – a sliver, a crack of light, a blurred image of desert sands.

He saw her first as a pinpoint on the dusty horizon. A white… chariot, with sand billowing out in sheets as it advanced down the dirt road. It drew closer and stopped outside of his field of vision – he let his eyelids drape closed again. He detected a change in brightness and forced them back open: a woman stood over him, blocking out the sun so that its rays formed a shimmering halo around her dark form. Her body compact, regal, draped with long dusky hair. A small, soft voice speaking to his brother; Loki's head buzzed so loudly that he could not make out the words. Her voice sounded gentle, concerned. She reached out a hand, cool and soothing, and pressed it to his brow. The hand must have contained some magic property, he thought, because the moment it touched his forehead he felt his mind clear, as though it had been dipped in cold spring water. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, letting the breath originate from the hand on his head and wash the coolness all the way down through the depths of his agony. Loki knew who this was – knew who this _must_ have been. He let the name roll off his parched lips:

"Sigyn."

He opened his eyes, his head now cleared, and knew instantly that he had been wrong.

"Um, no," said the woman. "Sorry if you… It's Jane, actually. Jane Foster."

He could have laughed aloud at his own weakness and stupidity if he'd possessed the energy. Absolutely inane, letting physical injury alter his mental state to such a capacity that he thought his former wife, of all people, had come to his aid. The two had not, to put it gently, left one another on friendly terms. In all likelihood she might have been present at this moment if only to give his cracked ribs a well-aimed kick.

Regardless, the discovery that the woman standing over him was little piffling Jane Foster did nothing for Loki's injuries. He felt any perceived coolness melt abruptly away, leaving him with a hot dead sea of aches and searing chills and sweat. He gasped, gulping for air, hissing as a wave of pain crashed into his lungs, his brain, his guts. In a desperate attempt at relief he visualized all of that pain forming a massive orb, twisting and gathering and–

Suddenly he saw Jane and Thor leap into the air as though thrown and land a few feet away from his broken body. He began to wonder woozily how that might have happened when everything went black.

* * *

Jane Foster had a long time in the van on the way to the crash site to think about how absolutely insane her life had become. For starters, this morning she had been standing in her bedroom at SHIELD labs and her fiancé had pointed a gun at her face.

_Her _fiancé _had pointed a gun at her face._

At first she thought she had been crazy to put her hands in the air at the sight of the gun. Who had she been kidding? It was Garrett, Garrett who she had let so completely into her world. Garrett who had helped her forget that the man – the _god_ – she thought she'd loved was probably never coming back. Garrett who had made life in the bunker... bearable. But who had he been, really? What had she known about him? She knew she'd loved him... though she'd loved him... still loved him? She had known, when she was with him, that she was probably going through a classic "two-people-are-attracted-to-each-other-and-decide-to-get-married-because-why-not" scenario. Anything of relative importance, Jane had never bothered to ask him. What was his family like? Did he want a destination wedding? A big honeymoon? Kids? He'd made their engagement ring in the labs, for Pete's sake. With materials from SHIELD storage. Or at least, that's what he'd told her.

Now that she thought about it, Garrett had told her a lot of unbelievable things.

Like how his skin never changed color despite the lack of sunlight because that was just "how his genes worked." ("I ran some tests on myself in the lab. I guess I'm an anomaly"). How he had access to this room of stored goods that Jane had never seen in all her time exploring the place. She'd assumed that because he had been there longer, he had been given special privileges. But how long could he possibly _have_ been there? The lab seemed to be pretty new when Jane had first arrived: she had seen guards going through orientation, scientists shaking hands as though they'd just been introduced.

Absolutely nothing about Garrett, she realized now, added up.

So now she sat in the van, still crying – _still_ crying – and feeling like an idiot for crying, and kind of wanting her engagement ring back, and everything that went with it. She had screwed up so, so badly by taking that SHIELD position. She knew now that the offer had been partially meant to protect her from Loki, who apparently, according to Thor, had promised to "pay her a visit." But then how messed up was it that _she_ had ended up paying _him_ a visit? Had Loki gotten what he wanted after all? Was he feigning reluctance at seeing her, when deep down he wanted to meet her, use her? And if so, for what?

Jane tried to tell herself that she had the upper hand in this situation. Loki was badly hurt, and now probably weakened to the point of immobility. She had done him a favor, keeping him away from Asgardian custody. And she had witnessed a moment during which he had lost control of his own power – had sent a signal into the universe that he hadn't meant to send. She knew there had to be more behind the haunting "We're done" than met the eye... or, in this case, ear. This was, at best, an opportunity not only to discover something groundbreaking about the connection between magic and science, but also to help Loki realize that his magic could do more good than harm.

And at worst... it was an adventure.

It had already been an adventure. She had scrambled onto the roof of SHIELD labs, faced streaked with tears, practically screaming in panic, to run smack into Nick Fury.

"Looks like you're pretty fed up with being here," Fury said. He'd stared straight down at her. His expression was absolutely, unequivocally unreadable. Blank as a bald rock face (no pun intended). "There are people who want to keep you pent up here. I'm not one of them. The battle is over, Loki is detained, and you owe us nothing."

So he didn't know about Loki. One wrong move on Jane's part, however, and he would. Jane had taken a deep breath and said, "I really would like to... to go home, if that's okay."

He had taken her gently by the arm and led her toward a helicopter. He'd scanned her face carefully with his good eye, looking for anything that might have prevented him from letting her leave. Finally he'd nodded to the helicopter pilot.

"Territory Two-Alpha. She'll show you where to land."

* * *

Jane saw them first as two pinpoints on a dusty horizon. One of them light, red, and strong, supporting a weak, dark shadow. Jane was reminded vaguely of _Pietà_, Michelangelo's Vatican statue of Mary holding her son after his crucifixion. What a vastly inappropriate reference for this situation, Jane laughed to herself.

Jane parked the van far enough away from the two that she did not scatter more dust on their already sandy forms. She stepped out onto the dirt and waved at Thor. He returned her greeting with a nod; both of his hands supported his brother, whose face looked like a wane dollop of white against his dark armor. Jane rummaged in the back of the van for a first aid kit, although she knew it probably wouldn't do much good.

"How is he?" she asked Thor as she stood over the wayward pair. It was such a pointless question that Thor didn't even bother responding. Loki looked as though someone had poured white wax over badly bruised bone and musculature. The demigod had lapsed into a state of barely-consciousness, with one hand on his stomach and the other across his forehead in a final vain attempt to nurse his injuries. The area around his eyes looked like it had been made up for a role in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video – the dark circles were almost comical. The lids inside the rings of black opened faintly and glassy eyes peered out at Jane, fevered and unfocused. Jane was struck once more by how green they were. She carefully reached out a hand to feel Loki's forehead but stopped just short of touching him. Jane hesitated, fearful that Loki's eyes might snap open and his hand might dart out and crush her wrist the second she made contact. She looked at Thor. He didn't meet her gaze; his eyes were fixated with worry on Loki's face.

Oh, what the hell, she thought, and reached out and laid her palm Loki's brow.

The skin was smooth but scorching. A fever for sure, and a bad one. But although the touch burned, Jane was oddly content to keep her hand there; she felt as if she were touching a sleeping tiger, something immensely dangerous that was made more endearing when it was weakened, vulnerable. Loki's eyes closed again when he felt her hand on his face. His features seemed to smooth out like a sail after a storm. Despite the gravity of his health, Jane couldn't help but smile a bit – she was doing something right.

Her spirits fell, however, when Loki opened his lips and whispered: "Sigyn."

Crap, thought Jane. He doesn't know it's me. Delirium had ruined the moment after all. There was some part of her that wanted to croon, "Yes, my love, I'm here" – partially for amusement but also to give him some sort of comfort. But the strangeness of it all was too much: why on earth was she finding herself wanting to comfort him? He was here, she was Jane, and this was all ridiculous.

"Um, no," said Jane. "Sorry if you… It's Jane, actually. Jane Foster."

Loki's brow furrowed immensely and he began to shiver, as if all the respite her hand had given him had vanished. Jane was about to tell Thor they needed to get him back to the lab when–

_Bam_. Jane felt as if an immense hand had blasted up through the sand and vaulted her off the face of the earth. She landed several feet away from the fallen demigod, the breath knocked out of her and her hair in knots. She coughed dust out of her throat, let her vision clear, and searched for Thor in the clearing clouds. Thor shook his head rapidly.

"Are you injured, Jane?" he called out.

"What...?" was all Jane could think to say. "What _was_ that?"

She whipped her head in Loki's direction, fully expecting him to be standing upright in full battle armor, staff gleaming, restored to his former glory. Everything up to that point would have been his elaborate prank, a fantastic job of feigning weakness up until the exact moment that Loki was alone with just Jane and Thor, in a desert in the middle of nowhere.

No such thing. Loki was sprawled flat on his back, totally out cold.

* * *

**How about them apples? The three of them are together now, for better or for worse, and as Jane suspected, there's more to Loki than meets the eye.**

**Nick Fury, I can assure you, isn't totally out of the picture. And what on earth is taking Odin so long to act up? **

**More soon! Thanks everyone!**


	9. Chapter 8

**Second chapter of the day! (Again, technically it's "tomorrow" but oh well. Many of you are probably still awake).**

**This was a fun one to write... Definitely a "storm is darkest just before the clouds recede" chapter. And Jane and Loki have a couple good... uh... moments. I hope no one is getting impatient with my incredibly subtle Lokane - I'll speed things up soon, I promise.**

**Thanks again to one and all for the support and reviews and enthusiasm. I hope I'm responding to reviewer questions by clearing things up as I go along. If you have stuff you're dying to know, ask me in a review and I'll drop you a hint. ;)**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

"Let's get him on the couch," said Jane.

Thor walked over to the white furniture carrying the unconscious god of lies like a baby doll. If Jane hadn't been so thoroughly exhausted she might have laughed. Every one of her movements was fueled by adrenaline at this point, by the immense strangeness of housing an incapacitated supervillain on her sofa.

The ride home had been immensely uncomfortable. Thor and Jane hadn't spoken a word – especially not about the absence of Jane's engagement ring. Especially not about how puffy her eyes were from crying. _Especially_ not about how long Jane's hand had lingered on Loki's forehead. They had sat, staring out the windows, fingers crossed that Loki's prone form wouldn't emit another sonic blast from the back of the van.

"Would you mind going to the car and getting the groceries once he's comfortable?" asked Jane. "I picked up a bunch of food and random medical supplies – bandages and ibuprofen and stuff."

"'Ibu…'" said Thor, raising a golden eyebrow.

"Ibuprofen. It helps with pain and fever. Just… please go get the bags, okay? I've gotta look at him."

Thor seemed wounded but did as he was told. He went out to the van in a bit of a huff, Jane smiling ruefully after him. Although things were awkward with Thor – she still felt a small pang of longing in her chest whenever she looked at him – Jane knew she couldn't chase the god of the thunder away. Jane groped through her brain to think of non-emotional reasons for hanging onto Thor. He had to know at least a little about Asgardian medicine, and he provided invaluable protection. What was more, he was Loki's older brother. He'd seen the Jotun as a baby, an adolescent, in times of sickness, health, strength and weakness. There had to be some part of Loki, figured Jane, that would respond differently to the presence of Thor than to that of a stranger.

While the god of thunder collected groceries from the back of the van, Jane set about assessing how she could get some of Loki's armor off. It seemed as though everything had been literally stitched onto him: all the folds of cloth blended perfectly into sheets of metal, chains, and complicated needlework. Despite the amount of dust and blood it had accumulated, it was truly beautiful, its lovely bottle green fabric a perfect compliment to the god's closed eyes. Jane drew a sharp little breath when she realized her hands were no longer searching the armor for seams: she was simply stroking it in admiration. She blushed, even though no one had seen her in the act. There was something so... taboo, she realized, about removing a stranger's clothing as he slept. It was weird, it was wrong, it was frankly very sensual...

But in this case, she reminded herself, shaking out her head, it was necessary. She walked over to the kitchen and grabbed a pair of cooking shears from the knife rack by the sink. She returned to Loki's side, kneeled down next to him, and found a spot on the side of his shirt that seemed as good as any to cut. She lifted the scissors and carefully – _carefully_ – made a tiny incision in the cloth.

"What are you doing?" said an icy voice.

Jane gasped and practically jabbed Loki in the side with the scissors. Her heart jumped out her ears.

"Jesus!" she breathed. "God, I had no idea you were awake. Uh..." she didn't know how to explain what she was doing to him without sounding creepy. (She laughed inwardly – she couldn't believe she was worrying about sounding creepy in front of the creepiest person she'd met in a while). She decided to go the matter-of-fact route. "Basically, you're not doing so well. I need to look at your injuries so Thor and I can help you on your way to healing them."

"So you..." Loki was having a difficult time breathing, his inhales shallow and ragged, his words clipped. Jane could tell his window of consciousness was fleeting. "So you mangle... my garments..."

"Well, it's either I undress you or Thor does. Do you have a better idea?"

Loki waved a hand in the world's slightest gesture, as if to say, "whatever." And with that, he was sleeping again. Jane cut the fabric neatly around the metal plates and shoulder pads and cuffs that lay underneath, and gently pulled everything out from under Loki's torso. She took a deep, shaky breath to brace herself for the sight of his injuries and turned her eyes toward his body.

She could not believe what she was seeing. At first she thought it wasn't possible that it was all bruises– he must have donned some sort of Chitaurian war paint before beaming down to Earth. She had never, ever, _ever _seen a palate of welts quite like this. Every inch of his chest and sides was some sort of mottled purple, blue, green, yellow, pink; it was like a modern painting gone wrong.

His abdomen was a different story altogether; the entire area from the base of his ribs to his hip bones had taken on a gruesome shade of… what was it, even? Jane guessed eggplant would be the closest color, if you could even compare wounds to vegetables. The region looked angry and puffy – the words "internal bleeding" sprang instantly to Jane's mind. This was totally out of her league as a former lifeguard first-aid trainee. She let her hand hover over Loki's navel, afraid to touch him for fear that the contact would make the wounds bloom to the surface of his skin and he would simply fall apart. Even with her hand inches away she could feel heat radiate from him. Abruptly it hit her that it was very possible Loki was dying, his life sputtering out beneath layers of bruises. And with him would die… What _would_ die? All Jane knew was that the injuries she was looking at were, at the very least, what any ER would consider a "code blue." And that she would not, _could _not be responsible for another living thing dying in her care. She bit her lip until she tasted blood. Dammit dammit dammit dammit… She realized just how deep she had waded into matters that were totally, completely beyond her– and she could think of only one thing to do:

"Thor!" she cried, tasting bile in the back of her throat. _"Thor!"_

Thor cleared his throat and she jumped. He had been standing behind her with two burly arms full of paper bags, for how long she had no idea. She looked up at him plaintively, pleading, helpless.

"I have lived a very long time, Jane," he said quietly. "And I have seen much worse."

But Jane knew he was lying when she saw the tears in his eyes.

"There is a word for these kinds of injuries in Asgardian medicine…" Thor began, but stopped talking, bemused. Jane looked at him with raised eyebrows, expecting him to say something knowledgeable, helpful, _hopeful_.

Thor looked skyward for a moment, squinting. He let out a tiny, mirthless chuckle. "But as I live and breathe I cannot remember what the word _is_."

Silence. Loki's labored breathing tore giant gaping holes in the atmosphere. The sun was setting outside and Jane felt utterly bereft.

"There's a word for it in _Mid_gardian medicine," she said. "It's called 'internal hemorrhaging.'"

"That is quite fancy," said Thor with a crooked grin. "And how is it remedied here?"

"Surgery, and tons of antibiotics," said Jane, not knowing whether Thor would understand those words, and not caring. "Things you can't get unless you're a doctor… a healer… in a hospital, with advanced equipment, and tons of money, and time, and knowledge, and skills…" And there she was, off crying again. A surgeon wouldn't cry, she thought, especially not if he or she were operating on a mass murderer. But what kind of motivation was that? She wished for this moment that she'd been pre-med and not stupid, stupid astrophysics. God, this was all so messed up.

And before she could tell Thor she didn't need comforting, he was there with his arm around her, sobbing harder into the nape of her neck than she had ever seen any man sob. _Oh lord, _she thought, _we're both basket cases over this sociopath... No– No! Over this… this misunderstood demigod who is dying in front of us, and we're just sitting here crying about it?_

"Ice," said Jane, neatly and plainly, her tears abruptly ceasing.

"I am going to drive the van to the store and get tons of bags of ice. You stay here," she said, lifting Thor's face off her shoulder, "and make a cold compress for his forehead with a dishrag and some water. Get him propped up a little bit and make him take a bottle of ibuprofen. The _whole_ bottle. He's a god, his system should handle it. Get some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls from the grocery bags and dab his cuts with it. And before you do _any_ of that: wake him up. Okay? Wake him up and _keep him awake_. We are _not_ going to let his body shut down, because chances are that's when he stops using his magic to heal."

"Jane Foster commands her humble servant as fiercely as any warlord," said Thor, wiping his tears. "For you I shall persevere."

"Please don't do it for me," said Jane, pulling on her jacket.

* * *

Loki awoke to the sharp, short sound of a palm whipping against his bruised face. His sluggish brain registered the sting a few moments later. _Superb_, he thought, _the Chitauri have found me already and are rousing me for another round of one-sided fisticuffs._

And then he saw Thor's big hairy face beaming down at him.

"Oh," he rasped. "This is much worse."

The next thought that slammed into his groggy head was _Agghhhhhhh stomachstomachstomach. __And skull and legs and chest and…_

"Easy, brother," said Thor in the most idiotic, gushing voice possible; he sounded as if he were reassuring a mare in labor… Which, coincidentally, Loki had literally been at one point. Being comforted by Thor, he reasoned, was not unfamiliar, having fought with Thor as brothers for centuries – but the insult-to-injury factor was a little overwhelming for him at the moment. Here he was, helpless as a newborn kitten, being acutely patronized by his disavowed brother-turned-adversary, and feeling as though his organs had been run through with a hot poker. He had plainly run out of little magic tricks, Chitaurian thought devices, and biological adrenaline. He was so completely, utterly finished with Midgard and all of its relentless tortures. Thor was correct in at least one regard: meddling with this planet had been a dreadful mistake.

"Where do you feel the most pain?" needled Thor. Loki didn't respond, taking a moment to survey, anemically, his current situation. He was in a bright, cool room, just as tedious as any other Midgardian facility. He was prostrate and – the insult ever-piling on – his tunic and armor had been removed. Loki did not gaze down at his injuries; he knew they were not going to resemble one of Frigga's paintings of Asgardian foliage in the springtime and beyond that he did not wish to know anything about their visual attributes. He leaned his head back against his surprisingly plush support and closed his eyes. His sole solace was a sensation of cool, damp, soft pressure on his brow; he knew it was probably a compress but he allowed himself to imagine it was the hand he had thought was Sigyn's…

Thor clapped his broad hands in Loki's face and the god of lies jolted errantly back into wakefulness.

"Jane Foster has commanded I keep you awake, so that you do not lapse into unconsciousness that will lead inevitably… to your death," said Thor, attempting to sound authoritative.

"I do not know," murmured Loki, allowing his eyes to drift to their minimum state of openness, "whatever you saw in that deranged woman."

"You still have not answered my question, brother," pressed Thor. "Please, if you want any of your capabilities to return you must allow me to help you."

Loki winced, fighting dizziness, and ran another check of his wounds. He prepared himself mentally and physically for a good, long oration. "At this juncture… my list of major ailments includes… but is not limited to… my left leg, my hips, my ribs, and my head. Whatsoever is going on in my abdomen, however… is in a category of its own uniquely… wretched malignance."

Loki lay back gingerly and threw the god of thunder what he hoped registered as a smirk from beneath the rag on his brow. Or a scowl; he was not picky as long as it was condescending. Although everything he had just uttered was true, he saw no reason to carry on about it unnecessarily. After all, the body and the mind could ultimately be considered separate and–

A jolt of merciless anguish ripped through his core like a rusty knife. Perception be damned, he thought, and let out a miserable groan.

When he opened his eyes again there was a small, curious white receptacle being wagged in front of his nose.

"Stopit," he muttered quickly.

"Swallow them, brother! They are Midgardian… healing beans. 'Ih-boo-prohf-een,'" Thor smiled dumbly at his mostly-failed attempt at pronunciation.

"Not interested," said Loki. "Even if… my throat… did not feel like it were lined with dried goose down… I do not trust Midgardian 'healing beans'… as far as… I could throw them."

"But assuredly you could throw them quite far," said Thor. And without further ado he emptied the bottle into Loki's mouth, poured in some water from a glass and plugged the younger god's nose and clamped his jaw shut. Loki found himself masticating the damned pills even though he felt like vomiting – and vomiting all over Thor, at that.

"When I am healed..." Loki gasped, "...rest assured... I will find a way to shove these blasted pills down your gullet... while they are still... in the bottle..." Sleep tickled the corners of his mind again. His eyelids sunk... Why why why. Why did he have to be in the care of his insufferable one-time kin and a tiny, weepy harlot? He wondered about all this as slumber crawled like a sheath over his feverish brain...

The pressure of two pounds of bags filled with ice cubes landed squarely across his entire bare torso.

Because he did not have the energy to scream the air from his frozen lungs, Loki simply gaped, wide eyed, at the pitifully concerned-looking Jane Foster as she lowered more ice, this time onto his legs. The cold was simply, clearly, and plainly torturous. It was rage-provoking, agonizing, humiliating...

And suddenly the aches in his abdomen receded a bit, and Loki was forced to inwardly admit that the ice was – while rudimentary – rather pleasant.

Jane must have seen the look of astonished relief on his face that he hadn't thought to conceal, because she leaned in closer than she ever had before and said, almost coyly:

"You're welcome."

* * *

**Ooooo, is Jane doing a little flirting...? Maybe...?**

**Next chapter should be super fun as well - the bizarre threesome will try to tolerate one another, and Jane and Loki will end up "tolerating" each other more than they assumed they would.**

**Review if ya like it, if you have suggestions, thoughts or questions! Or just to say hi!**

**Thanks!**


	10. Chapter 9

**So this chapter won't be as long as the others, but darnit if good stuff doesn't happen!**

**Also, please don't fault me for this shameless plug, but: it's my birthday tomorrow! So... birthday reviews would be appreciated...? ;)**

**Once more, you reviewers and commenters are just awesome. Thanks for coming on this adventure with me, guys!**

**And without further ado:**

* * *

Loki felt as though he were in Jotunheim.

The cold of the bags should have seemed more natural than it did. After all, being buried in ice was any Jotun's biological stasis. Still – it was difficult to feel at all natural in a sterile Midgardian sitting room, half-naked, powerless, covered in all manner of cloths and compresses, and wracked by the still-novel sensation of a fever. He imagined his body as a torrent of flames trapped beneath a sheath of frost… Or was it the inverse of that…?

Blast, he thought. The cranial pain of contemplation was simply not worth the effort.

So he allowed himself to lay back and watch Jane Foster fret over him.

He had decided after his unsettling bout of unconsciousness (a state which was rarely involuntary for quasi-immortals) that acting like a wounded wild animal would do him no measurable good. So long as he made it clear to himself that accepting Jane's aid had been _his_ choice and not hers, he could swallow most of the scathing remarks that bubbled up in his throat whenever she brushed his bruises.

The thought crossed his thumping head that, in a grand abandonment of self-worth, he seemed to be swallowing everything lately: his sharp tongue, his pride, those preposterous "healing beans…"

Even now the woman was thrusting at his lips with a thin glass tube. It was all astoundingly degrading.

"Harlot," he muttered wearily, unable to contain the insult any longer. "How dare you assault the rightful king of Asgard with your puny, phallic–"

Before he could finish, she had shoved the glass rod under his dry tongue.

"Close your mouth," she said tiredly. Loki could have sworn he'd seen the corners of her lips turning up a hint, as though she were taking pride in some sort of dominance. If this ritual had anything to do with the asinine Midgardian concept of "feminism," Loki wanted no part in it. He lay there with the glass in his mouth and chanced a glance down his nose at it. He only had time to register a slim red bar and some numerals before his head swam from crossing his eyes and he grimaced. He supposed the glass was some useless test to remind Jane Foster how critically ill he was. What a gas, humans and their obsession with knowing all the little petty numbers on thousands of contradicting scales that corresponded to everything, from how cooked their tasteless food was to what types of garments fit their unremarkable frames. They were ceaselessly _measuring_ rather than _experiencing._

Jane removed the device from Loki's mouth and shook it out several times before peering at it and shaking her own head.

"One oh two point three," she muttered, frowning.

Loki didn't bother wasting the energy to ask what the number meant. More likely than not it simply foreshadowed Jane bursting into tears at any moment. Instead of crying, however, she gently pulled the rag from his forehead – thank Valhalla for that, it had started to feel like his own personal swamp – and dipped it in some fresh ice water.

The demigod took the moment she had turned her eyes from him to study her in turn. A good deal of time on Asgard was spent comparing acquaintances to flora and fauna; it was a social tick that served as a way to ground Asgardian experience in its community with nature, with other stars and planets. Jane Foster had at first been a little rodent, shrewish and insignificant and vermin like. But now… Loki couldn't discern whether the fever had burned a hole in his sanity or if some strange, nagging sentiment had crawled back into him since he'd spent time with these miserable weaklings… Jane was beginning to evoke images of a Midgardian doe. Small, light body, sleek and dusky hair, soft dark eyes. Her countenance was quiet – but when disturbed, angered or frightened, she became quick and tense, fiercely self-protective.

It was no small wonder he had mistaken her for Sigyn…

_Nonononono_, Loki suddenly thought, attempting to banish the comparison as quickly as possible. His breathing quickened and he hissed through layers of pain that had abruptly reacquainted themselves with his nerves. He cursed himself inwardly for the weakness; if only the Chitauri could see him now. Huddled on a Midgardian sofa, useless, helpless, wearing ailment on his sleeve like a pitiful swain.

Jane caught the expression of anguish as she laid the newly cool cloth on his brow. "How's your head?" she asked.

"Dreadful," said Loki through clenched teeth. Little point in lying at this juncture. He also had no interest in giving "Healer Jane" the satisfaction of any personal triumph in medicine.

"Your ribs?"

"Miserable."

"Your leg?"

"Terrible."

"Your stomach?"

"Agonizing."

"Something has _got_ to be feeling at least a little better."

"I never said... anything... was not better... than before."

Jane lifted one of the ice packs from his middle. The shifting weight was excruciating. "Well, your abdomen's less distended than a few hours ago, so that's something..."

A few hours... Had Jane Foster really spent that much time prodding at him? Loki dug through his sluggish mind and tried to remember all the recent times she had brewed that bizarre, hot brown Midgardian drink for herself... The number of times she had changed his compresses, checked his wounds... The number of bottles of – what was it, again? – Extra-Strength Tylenol he'd consumed...

How many times he had wanted her to leave...

Zero, he realized. He had not wished her away one single time that evening. Somehow, the company of a mortal had not sickened him to the point of banishing her from his sight...

Suddenly a razor-sharp pang rushed along the fracture in his skull and he saw spots. The temperature in the room dropped to the floor and his heart sunk with it. He felt massive tremors rock his freezing body; the last thing he remembered was Jane calling out to him, panicked...

* * *

Jane was digging through the grocery bags at the side of the couch when she heard a harsh choking noise from the cushions, followed by the sound of chattering teeth. She looked up at Loki and felt her gut drop to her knees.

He was shaking uncontrollably. And he was blue.

Entirely blue.

His eyes were clenched shut against the tremors and, presumably, any pain they produced. Jane shot a glance over to Thor; he was still sleeping in an armchair, his blonde head on his chest. Jane panicked. She had no idea whatsoever what the blueness might mean. All she knew was that she had to make contact with Loki in case this was a seizure.

"Hey..." she said firmly. She reached out a hand to touch his arm and screamed as a small explosion shot from his fingertips. Shards of ice scattered and buried their sharp points in the carpet. Her hands shook violently, she fought every impulse her body emitted that told her to run from the room, hyperventilate, burst into tears. There was no 9-1-1 number that could fix this. This was happening now, to her, and she was responsible.

"Hey!" she cried, forcibly and plaintively. "Hey- _Hey!_"

Shitshitshit, he didn't notice her. Shit!

"Hey!" she yelled, shouted, and now she really was crying. "Loki– _Loki!_ Look at me! Look at me! Loki _please look at me_. _Loki!_"

His eyes snapped open and Jane instinctively shot backward on the rug. They were red. Not bloodshot – ruby _red_ from the irises all the way through the whites. OhGodohGodohGod...

"Okay, uh, hey..." she was panting in terror. "Hey– it's Jane... Jane Foster. I need you to... uh... stay with me... please stay with me... and just– No– _No! Loki do _not_ close your eyes I swear to God__!_ Just... okay remember, remember..." she wracked her brains, thinking about something she could use to connect with him. "Remember the elevator, okay? That elevator in the SHIELD containment building that went down to... went down to where you were being held? Yes? Can you... pleasejust... please... just... describe it for me, okay? What did it look like...?"

Loki's red eyes bored intensely into her for a few moments before a violent spasm shook him and they began to drift closed–

"_Loki!_" she was sobbing now. "Describe... the elevator! Please... please–"

"S-s-s-silver," said Loki, trembling. His voice sounded five octaves deeper than usual, thunderous and grating.

"Good... goodgoodgood! Okay... um... buttons. How many buttons did it have... Loki come on _how many buttons?_"

"Th-th-three..." a sputter of ice showered from his hand.

"And... can you remember what they were? Three! Three buttons in the elevator, Loki, what did they say..."

"Up," he rasped. The blue had begun to fade from his cheeks. "Down." And he never needed to say the label on the third button. His skin returned to its default shade of white. He breathed deeply, squeezing his eyes shut, lips curling back.

Jane sat on the carpet, panting, exhausted. What on earth was she doing trying to talk a dangerous, magical frost giant down from a fever-induced seizure? She felt entirely, utterly drained. She looked over at Thor – somehow the god of thunder had slept through the entire ordeal. She groped at her now empty left ring finger and suddenly felt very, very alone. She took a hitching breath and let the tears stream from her eyes.

"Jane," a voice said, softly and sincerely. She lifted her head to find that Loki had turned his own, resting against the couch, towards her. His eyes had returned to their natural bottle green; they were glazed with pain, but, for the first time, somewhat peaceful. Exhausted yet serene.

"Why are you no longer betrothed?" he asked. Jane searched for any hint of sarcasm, irony, or mockery in his voice. She found none.

"My fiancé," Jane ventured, "was prepared to shoot me... to save his own life."

She cried. She didn't care if Loki watched. The silence was dabbled with her sniffles. Loki waited for her to calm herself a bit before speaking again.

"What a wretched bastard," he said. Jane listened again for sarcasm, again found none. Apparently feeling the aftermath of his episode, Loki let out a tiny, soft moan, curled his arms slowly around his stomach, and turned his head away from Jane.

Jane sighed, wiped away her tears, and got up off the carpet to wake Thor.

* * *

**What's next? Wanna find out?**

**Review and tune in soon! Hopefully tonight, definitely tomorrow! Birthday update wooo!**

**Thanks again guys!**


	11. Chapter 10

**Hi everyone! Happy Thorsday eve (considering it's officially Wednesday here in the US Midwest). **

**First of all, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes! I had a great day, ate tons of chocolate cashews, shopped at J. Crew and generally loved life.**

**Again, my reviewers are stellar human beings. You guys comment on how surprised you are for the fast updates, when really it's all of you who make them possible! So cheers!**

**Like last time: shorter(ish) chapter, but stuff happens. Enjoy!**

* * *

"Thor... Thor, hey..."

Jane's face appeared before his opening eyes. Sometimes when Thor looked upon her he could not believe he was looking at a mortal. Jane Foster was stars and moon and sun in a body so small, so perfect. Her head hovered so close to his; he wanted to reach out and pull it in, comfort her, _feel_ her…

"He turned blue."

"_What?_" Thor was off the couch in a second, striding over to his prone brother.

"Oh yes, Jane Foster," said Loki quietly, his dark-haired head still turned inward toward the back of the couch. "Please do immediately tell that dolt about my mortifying outburst."

"Jane was right to tell me," said Thor defensively. "You could have been dying."

"Because you cared ever so much about my mortality when you let me drop off the Bifrost into oblivion-"

"It was _your_ decision to let go and we _all_ suffered for it!" Thor roared.

"I think," said Jane, "I'll leave you two… alone for a bit." She adjusted the bag of ice on Loki's chest and walked out to the van, leaving Thor fuming next to the couch.

"I can_not _believe you would snap at her like that, and after all the aid she's given you!"

"I would have been perfectly content," growled Loki, "to return to Asgard. For some absurd reason the both of you determined that my thoroughly injured body would be better off in your incapable hands."

"You do not know everything there is to know about Jane, Loki. She has been a great help."

"Relatively speaking, yes," said the injured demigod, wrapping his arms tighter about himself beneath the ice bags, as though talking was painful.

"Then you have nothing to complain about."

"Besides the myriad forms of agony wracking my body, about which I can do nothing."

"Not for long," said Thor, his spirits already lifting at the opportunity to impress his brother. "Look here, brother." He pulled a small gold disc from the folds of his armor.

Loki turned his head from the back of the couch, wincing. "I'm looking."

"It is a coin," said Thor, employing his best descriptive skills, "I found in that chair's cushions, imprinted with a Midgardian lady."

Loki sighed and dipped his eyes downward. "A Sacajawea dollar."

"Well, yes," said Thor, surprised at the Jotun's knowledge. "I suppose it is. How did you come to know that?"

Loki grinned, almost imperceptibly. "If you spent half the time in the Asgardian libraries that you did making eyes at Sif across the feast table, you would know a fair amount about Earth currency as well."

Thor bristled at the comment. "But what do you care for Midgardian currency? Or Midgard at all? It was you who tried to conquer it–"

"You cannot aim to rule any people you do not know," snapped Loki. "Regardless of how beneath you they may be."

"So you care about human currency and customs, but not whether you murder any of them on your path to ruling them–"

Loki's eyes flashed and whipped he head up in Thor's direction. "Oh," he spat, "you think yourself such a capable ruler. Such a _virtuous_ king. The white knight, treading the path of the righteous, kissing babes on their ruddy foreheads and assisting the elderly in carting their shabby wares to their ramshackle cottages. Fighting for _good_ because that is what is _right_. Sentimental placations mean nothing, _nothing_ without knowledge. When the Chitauri were not mercilessly torturing me I was hiding, _studying_ Midgard, reaching out to survey the planet with whatever magical capabilities I possessed. I learnt of Midgard's geography, its populations and cultures. I discovered its most beautiful locations and persons, and its gravest weaknesses: that which brings pleasure to the most humans and that which keeps the most awake, tossing in their fitful slumbers. I grasped hope, fear, wealth, poverty, emotion, love – yes, love. I could have sought out Jane Foster and bent her to my will without so much as moving a muscle. I could have forced her emotional and physical desires, _hooked _them towards myself and away from your sorry mug as revenge for the crown your pure birthright stole from me. Why did I not do that? What had I to lose? Only your good graces, which, shockingly enough, proved extremely valuable to me after my unlikely downfall in that hideous Stark Tower. But alas," he growled, his voice dripping with venom, "I relied on your aid only to discover that not only were you unable to acquire adequate medical care, but my attempts to wrest Jane's affections from you would have been moot considering she had forgotten about you enough to commit herself to a drooling, wimpish mortal rather than pine over your big blundering-"

Thor let out a bellow louder than a wild boar's and raised the back of his hand over Loki's face. "If you say one more word," he boomed, "I swear to you I shall break your jaw."

Loki's eyes went wide. He cocked an eyebrow. He made his face into the most obnoxious, condescending, smug facade he possibly could.

But he did not utter a single sound.

"Good," said Thor. "It is my turn to speak, brother. You owe me that much."

Loki shifted, grimaced, making himself marginally more comfortable. Thor knelt down at the edge of the couch.

"When you let go on the Bifrost, you broke the heart of an entire nation. Do not jeer at it brother, I do not aim to flatter you. Regardless of your actions against Midgardian and Asgardian peace, no one thought you evil. None of us blamed you for your anger; instead, we lamented the path you had chosen by letting go - a path we were certain could lead only to death. Our friends were beside themselves. The All-Father was bedridden once more. The people wore mourning garments from sunrise to sunset for days. And our mother-" Thor cleared his throat, trying to fight tears. They rolled down his cheeks regardless. "Frigga... she wept, Loki. She wept harder than I have... than I have ever seen another being weep. You may say... what you wish about Odin, about our companions, about myself... But Frigga was and _is_ your mother. She cared for you... raised you... loved you. She was utterly inconsolable when you fell. She could not eat, could not sleep, often refused to speak even to her husband. She suffered from nightmares, Loki, about your torture at the hands of the Chitauri. She could see it all happen to you when she closed her eyes, such was the intensity with which she grieved for you. And you returned her love, her suffering, by appearing on Midgard and wreaking havoc on its citizens. She thought you must have been under the Chitauri's total control, must have been cursed, possessed... but no..."

Thor could control his tears no longer; they fell unbound onto the ice packs covering Loki's broken body. When he lifted his head to look at his brother, Loki's head was turned away, his eyes tightly shut, his eyebrows drawn together.

Thor evened his breathing, unfolded his hand and pressed the gold coin into Loki's palm. He closed the Jotun's hand around the warm metal.

"You most likely know already," said Thor, his breath hitching with the remnants of a sob, "that young Midgardian magicians begin their craft by toying with coins, by vanishing and reappearing them. This... 'Sacajawea dollar,' as you so name it, is my way of telling you, from the bottom of my heart, that Asgard will receive you back with open arms when you are ready to be forgiven. The All-Father is not blind, nor is he daft; you and I both know full well he has been watching us here, in this place, and judging your actions and your words. Use the coin, brother, in regaining your magical strength. Let it be a vessel for you to begin to work some sort of good, for yourself and for me and for Jane. It will be tedious for you, I am sure, to have to begin with such a simple prop. It is the most I can offer you now. And the least you could do to thank me, to thank Jane, to redeem yourself – the very least you could do is accept this gift."

Loki opened his eyes again and looked down at his hand, the bruised knuckles of which Thor was supporting as he kept the coin inside. Thor studied the younger prince's eyes for tears – nothing. Dry as a bone.

But when Thor removed his hand from his brother's, Loki did not let go of the coin.

* * *

"One oh one point nine," said Jane after shaking out the thermometer. She went about her nursing routine for the eighth time in eight hours: replace compresses, put melted ice in the freezer, make coffee, uncap a new bottle of Tylenol, and – her newest addition to the repertoire, after the ice-shooting-from-Loki's-hands incident – get a warm comforter out of the oven and tuck it around her patient.

Jane held back a giggle at the sight of him. If only Thor could see it; she had trusted him to take the van and get more ice. Swaddled up in blankets with the consistency of giant marshmallows and covered head-to-toe in ice and white rags, Loki looked like a demented snowman. The glare he was sending her from the dark circles underneath his eyes was not helping him look any less comical. A picture of all this would be worth a thousand- no, a million words, Jane thought.

Speaking of words...

"You're being pretty quiet," she said, filling a glass of water in the sink so Loki could take the Tylenol. "Usually you have plenty to say about how I'm 'irritating your fragile wounds.'"

Silence.

"Well, since you're letting me speak..." said Jane, pouring some red pills out into her palm, "could I run something by you?" She waited for Loki to stretch out his own hand and take the pills before continuing. Loki put the pills in his mouth with a glower and stood by for the water while Jane talked. "When you and Thor first landed her, in New Mexico... You were semi-conscious and you... Well... You called me 'Sigyn' and then made the ground explode."

Loki spat the pills all over the comforter.

"Oh boy," said Jane, and was moving to clean the pills up when she felt Loki's hand on her wrist, cold and clammy.

"Forget... that ever happened," he said, his voice terse and hoarse. Tiny beads of sweat were forming at his hairline. His pale eyes looked... It was entirely new emotion, something Jane had never seen expressed by the fallen demigod.

He looked absolutely terrified.

"Um..." said Jane. "I'm assuming you mean forget the ground exploding, not the fact that you just spat Tylenol all over my blanket. Alright. I'll drop it. But only because I don't want to deterioriate your health more – this seems to be causing you a lot of distress." She picked the pills off the blanket one by one; the dye on each of them left a little red stain on the white fabric. Jane sighed. She wondered how many blankets would be ruined by the time she was through with her ministrations. She was walking to the kitchen to get a rag and some stain cleaner when she heard a tiny, low voice say:

"Thank you."

She whirled around, hoping (hoping? why hoping?) that Loki would be looking at her. But his head was turned toward the back of the couch once more. She was almost positive that she had imagined the "thank you" – she _had_ to have imagined it. She turned back to the cabinet under the sink and rummaged for the cleaner.

As she rotated again towards the couch, something flashed in her peripheral. Jane had just enough time to register Loki's eyes intensely focusing on his own hand as he gently flipped a gold coin through his fingers.

But milliseconds later he had vanished it. He glanced up at Jane, and she could have sworn she saw him blush.

Or maybe it was the lingering fever that was staining his cheekbones pink.

Yes, that had to be it.

* * *

**Awwwwwww.**

**Review if you like, guys! More on the way!**


	12. Chapter 11

**My reviewers are soooo great. I promise I'll try to address al your questions/comments either in the fic itself or with a little personal message. :)**

**So this chapter! **

**A lot of Loki POV at the top, some Jane stuff at the bottom. **

**A couple of you noticed this fic is getting slightly lighter as it goes along. I think that's really intentional: these are characters coming from dark places and somehow managing to find light in one another. Falling in love, after all, is like having darkness lifted. Additionally, I think that in a comic / comic movie verse like Marvel, all the characters get their moments of comic relief. Humor helps us relate to characters who are in turn struggling to relate to one another. I could never write a fic without it becoming, if anything, _more_ funny as it went along.**

**Thor is on his way out soon. Sad? A little. But we gotta make more room for Lokane, don't we? ;)**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Loki was fuming. Physically, from the fever, and mentally due to the fact that Jane Foster would not give him a moment's peace. Magic required solitude, and healing, at this juncture, required magic.

It was not as though Jane Foster's work keeping him alive and sane had been for naught. Although it would have tarnished his pride to say so, he had found himself quite enjoying Jane's little healing services. The Tylenol, while tedious to swallow, had been a welcome barrier against delirium. The damp cloths had kept his head from feeling like the inside of a smoking shack. The blankets were warm, the water was refreshing – and he would be lying if he did not admit that the feeling of a fresh ice pack on an angry wound was a godsend.

Lying… he used to be so adept at lying, so quick to replace the truth with a fabrication, so prepared to fib and misinform and perjure. At this point, however, lying would only confuse the woman who was sustaining his consciousness. Better, he determined, to sacrifice one's mercurial duplicity for a few hours than die and sacrifice it permanently. Biting the bullet, to use a Midgardian figure of speech, was temporarily the most prudent action.

Additionally, though, there was something about Jane Foster – perhaps her receptiveness, her ability to laugh and cry and rage so openly, the totally blind and naïve assistance she had given him – that stalled his tongue whenever he felt the urge to lie to her. It was _not_ sentiment, he assured himself. It was survivalism; his mouth refused to bite the hand that fed him. Literally, the hand that fed him pills.

Those pills had been working small, albeit slow magic in the form of physiological reaction. As had the ice, and the blankets, and the compresses. Loki knew, however, that they were merely deterrents against the pain that lurked with sharpened teeth, ready to spring should Jane's vigilance flag. It was pain that originated from injuries Jane foolishly believed she could heal with little Midgardian medical treatments – remedies for _symptoms_ rather than pathologies.

Jane's small back was turned to him now; she was concocting some more of that ridiculous drugged brown brew. The window of opportunity was open, albeit briefly. Loki braced himself against the pain of lifting his arm and focused every fiber of his nerves on the golden coin in his palm. He grasped little shreds of magic from the elements in the room, pinches of power each with their own functions. His feverish brain slowly categorized, stored and implemented each form of magic, arching and bending and guiding the tendrils towards the body of the coin. Carefully, carefully – for every bit of power had to be laid out just so – he wormed the elements underneath the coin and willed it to float slowly upward, mere millimeters off the flesh of his hand. He could feel a cold sweat worry his hairline beneath the already wet compress; his muscles tensed, his head ached, his stomach lurched...

And he began to shift the coin over to the gaps between his pale fingers. Over... under... over... under... _owowowow ignore the cramps ignore ignore ignore_... under... over... and...

_Dammit _Jane was watching him. He crammed all of his remaining energy into vanishing the coin, feeling the heat of the exertion flush his face. Jane had nosily asked for the details of the "Sigyn" incident in the desert – Loki was not prepared to let her know more about his magical prowess. Mortals always responded strangely to magic; it altered their perceptions of those endowed with powers, turning the magical into the strange, the taboo, the alienating...

But what of it, if he alienated Jane? Loki could have laughed at his own outlandish tendency toward actually _caring_ how he treated her. How irksome and exasperating it was to have a little human female slowly recalibrate his thoughts with every dose of Tylenol...

Doses of Tylenol that were, in fact, wearing off more quickly with every attempt at manipulating the coin. In his time hiding from the Chitauri, Loki had seen Midgardians commit their physical bodies to absurd and dangerous and tiresome feats as a way to deny mortality: "marathons" and such. Each time he maneuvered the coin Loki felt as though he had completed one of those foolhardy marathons: nauseous, shaky, sweating and breathless. Rebuilding organic magic from scraps of environmental ingredients was much akin to making a bowl of broth by squeezing water from a stone.

In short, it was taxing. No– utterly exhausting.

Nonetheless, it was necessary. Although each attempt at the coin weakened him temporarily, Loki felt as though a layer of his brain – and filaments of some of his less-injured muscles – were becoming firmer, keener. He was through being a bruised, shivering, sickened lump on a tiny, uncomfortable couch in a literal desert. He was a prince of Asgard, and a foresworn delegate of the most fearsome race in the universe, and he could play his own nursemaid, thank you very much! Jane Foster could sit by and slurp her repulsive "coffee" and watch as _real_ healing power blanketed his entire form and repaired every ailment in the blink of an eye–

Suddenly the worst stomach cramp he'd ever experienced careened through his insides. It was some of the most cosmic and transcendent pain Loki had ever felt; he saw stars, he doubled over and practically plummeted off the edge of the sofa.

The aftereffects of magical overexertion. Splendid.

He squinted through the anguish to be certain Jane Foster was not watching this epic display of frailty. (It would have been all downhill from there if she had seen; near constant pampering and embarrassing little Midgardian stomach ache potions and what have you). Having ascertained that Jane was now attempting to bang a malfunctioning coffee gizmo back into form, Loki took several incredibly painful breaths and gingerly straightened his back in its usual position against the couch's armrest. Little pangs still surged through his guts, but the worse, it seemed, had passed.

_Magic_, he thought, _is regrettably best practiced in _phenomenally _small spurts._ _In all probability I shall have to rethink my 'blink of an eye' fantasy_.

Well, wasn't this a pickle. Being stranded on Jane Foster's couch would be absolutely...

"Don't think I didn't notice you holding your stomach," said Jane from the coffee machine. She reached into the Midgardian icebox and pulled out a little pink bottle. Her dark hair lifted lightly off her shoulders as she walked towards him. "Take a good swig," she said, offerring the rosy vessel.

Loki squinted at it, feeling incredibly suspicious but, regrettably, desperate. He did as commanded. _"Embarrassing little Midgardian stomach ache potions." _What a pile of... oh goodness... a pile of _relief_.

"Don't knock Pepto til you try it," said Jane, readjusting one of the ice packs. "'Nectar of the gods,' huh?"

That shabby little woman, that useless little humiliating, pathetic... doe.

Loki began to rephrase his former thoughts: being stranded on Jane Foster's couch would be absolutely...

Bearable.

* * *

The pale light of dawn had begun to glitter through the glass walls of the lab. Jane blinked her half-sleep away and sat up, rolling out some of the kinks in her neck. Thor had taken the past few hours to watch over his brother, assuring Jane that he would wake her if they needed anything.

She looked over at the two of them now. They were both sleeping.

Wait, sleeping...

"_What_ did I tell you about letting him go to sleep?" Jane yelled, wrenching herself from her armchair in the flurry of sweatpants and tangled hair.

Both princes started awake, Thor with a loud grunt and Loki with a hiss of pain. Jane was having a difficult time remaining angry at the sight of them blinking owlishly in the light. Thor looked like a sleepy puppy and Loki like a bird of prey caught comically off-guard.

"We made a pact," croaked Loki, squinting up at Jane's frowning face, "that if we both nodded off and I bought the proverbial farm Thor would take full responsibility."

"The god of lies speaks the truth for once," mumbled Thor. "Our father-"

"_Your_ father-"

"_Our _father," said Thor with a scowl in Loki's direction, "would not have taken Loki's demise lightly and would probably have tossed me..."

"In a pit of slightly unattractive women," quipped Loki with a glower. "Imagine the horror."

Jane's jaw hung open. She had been asleep for, what, maybe four hours? And these two had somehow found the time to get back on bantering terms with one another. Very malicious bantering, but still...

"Do you have a head injury too, now?" she asked Thor.

"I certainly hope not," said the god of thunder. And then Jane saw him shoot a tiny, sideways glance at Loki.

"What was that?" she said. She felt like she was going crazy. "Hey- _Hey!_ I saw you look at him... I mean... I _saw_ that!"

"While you slept," said Loki, attempting to nudge his compress further off his eyes by flicking his head, "this idiot attempted to engage me in a discussion about your... ahem... your feminine features."

"_What?"_ gasped Jane.

"_Loki!"_ bellowed Thor.

"I of course said I had no wish to participate in such idle blathering," continued Loki, "but Thor insisted on pointing out what he perceived to be your... best merit, physically. Or shall I say your best two merits?"

Thor's entire face went as red as Loki's eyes had been earlier.

"Thor..." said Jane, her own face feeling extremely hot, "you might want to step out for a moment."

Thor threw Jane a look that said "why me?" He snarled at Loki and stormed out of the lab to the van.

"I know you just made all that up," said Jane to Loki as soon as Thor had left. She crossed her arms.

"But you could certainly imagine it happening," said Loki quietly. He wore the faintest little shit-eating grin.

Jane couldn't believe her own ears. "Agh, just... You know what's weird about all this? What's weird is that I don't even know why you would _want_ to make something up about Thor and me like that. Maybe you wanted to mess with us; maybe you're bored, or have some... weird crush on me because I fed you Pepto Bismol. Whatever. It's just weird."

Jane rearranged the comforter to give her hands something to do. Loki didn't say a word. He didn't stop grinning, either.

"I am going," said Jane huffily, "to the laundromat to wash the blanket you spit pills all over. I don't care what you two do here all day- just... don't destroy the place."

She went to the closet and returned with the dirty blanket. She was prepared to walk out the door when another reprimand crossed her mind and she bolted back over to the couch:

"And one more thing: don't you _dare_ talk about my... boobs! Wait... wait, what are those?"

There was a pile of gold coins on Loki's lap. Jane noticed for the first time since she'd come back from the closet that he was sweating profusely. He had become three shades paler in a matter of seconds.

"Sacajawea... dollars," Loki panted. "If I'm... not mistaken... a Midgardian... laundromat... requires coins, does it... not?"

Jane was stunned. She reached out a shaky hand and gathered the coins up from the fabric – they were curiously warm.

"Um, yes... it does," she said. "Thank you...? But where did you get them?"

Loki cracked one green eye open and turned it towards her. The corner of his mouth inched up his jawline ever so slightly.

"What is that... figure of speech on Midgard...? Ah, yes: 'a magician... never reveals... his greatest secret.'"

* * *

_I'm pretty sure he just committed fraud_, thought Jane as she drove down the dirt road to the laundromat, gold coins clinking in her cupholder. _If magic can even be considered fraudulent._

What a totally strange twenty-four hours it had been. Harboring two demigod brothers, playing nurse to one of them while attempting to keep the other from slobbering all over her...

Totally strange. But not totally bad.

And the strangest part of it all? She hadn't been angry because Loki had brought up Thor talking about her... you-know-whats...

She had been angry that it been _Thor_ noticing them, and not Loki himself.

* * *

**Hehe. I'm earning my T rating.**

**So Thor will probably say his goodbyes in the next chapter (not solely because of the boob incident haha). And it'll give the remaining two a chance to be solely in each other's company for awhile. Should be interesting...**

**Review with questions/comments! Thanks!**


	13. Chapter 12

**You guys.**

**I am SO sorry that this update is coming to you so late. My boyfriend's birthday is actually two days after mine, so we had a birthday weekend of sorts. And it's finals week at my school. So much craziness.**

**But I'm going to post two chaps tonight I think! So get pumped for that.**

**I gotta say, the reviewers have all been amazing once more. At the top of the next chapter I'll take a moment to address a couple cool questions you asked. but I wanted to get this to you ASAP.**

**One note: there's a disclaimer about Thor at the bottom of this chapter, but read on for more deets about him!**

**Thanks for your patience and enjoy!**

* * *

"I do not understand why you would tell Jane I said that," fumed Thor, pacing before Loki's spot on the couch like a caged lion.

"I was merely," said Loki, balancing a coin above the white skin of his palm, "attempting to scrape the slate clean with a little honesty. I thought you might appreciate a bit of straightforwardness from the 'mischief maker.'" He turned his face towards Thor's and let the coin plop into his hand. "Or are you so naïve as to think that your words cannot come back to haunt you? Tsk, and here you believe _I_ lack a conscience."

"You manipulated my intentions, brother," grumbled Thor. "This trickery is precisely why Odin fears your reinstitution into Asgardian society."

"You should know full well by now that roguishness is written in my blood," said Loki. "The All-Father should not be any more _afraid_ of my inherent traits than he already was. The Chitauri assuredly did not endow me with cleverness – or 'trickery,' call it what you wish. For all their brute strength their skulls are thicker than your own, which is a marvel considering how dense you are."

Thor's brawny hands clenched into fists. "I still cannot comprehend what good could _possibly_ have arisen from humiliating me in front of Jane._"_

"Good?" asked Loki, bending his neck until it cracked like a snapped sprig. "What might compel you to think that I am at all concerned with 'good?' What's more, you continue to treat me as though I am still the subject of a massive SHIELD witch hunt, when I am _clearly_ in no state to pose a threat. While it buries a thorn deeper in my side than I prefer, I must say: in my current condition, attempting to assault either of you would only result in unbearable agony. I make one verbal quip and you are both of you up in arms! Here I lay, still bedridden, and you and Miss Foster play the victims! Jesting is simply that which is stated in _jest_. Only adolescents and village idiots are truly wounded by a little 'adult colloquy.'"

As always with Loki, Thor did not know how to respond to this verbal onslaught, and O! it was endlessly frustrating. _If only I were an even match for you now on the field of battle, brother,_ he thought. _Were you not ill this argument would be settled in a matter of minutes, and I am fairly certain as to the victor_.

"Let us," Loki continued, "readdress an earlier comment of yours; how could I possibly _manipulate_ the intentions of a male attempting to ogle a female's bosom? You displayed the basest sexuality; if anything I took advantage of a golden opportunity to reveal to Jane that she was fostering... hm! fostering... the health of individual who will keep her in the know reagarding his brother's perversions."

"_Ha!_" barked Thor, causing the younger demigod to startle in his spot underneath the comforter and then immediately screw up his eyes in response to aggravated bruises.

"Oh, I simply adore being shocked into dislocating several ribs anew," seethed Loki.

Thor hadn't even heard the retort.

"You called me brother!" he cheered, a broad smile spreading his mouth wide.

"Erm, no," said Loki. "I'm afraid you misheard me."

"Oh, I heard you loud and clear, brother!" Thor thought his face might fall apart from smiling so widely.

"Then I must still be delirious," said Loki, making a demonstrative point to weaken his voice and wince as he slowly leaned his head against the couch.

"Jane told me your fever is no longer dangerously high."

"Then it must have slipped my mind somehow that I have thoroughly disowned you as my kin," Loki snapped.

Although he knew his brother was probably bluffing, Thor felt stung by the comment. Changing the subject, he thought, might be best.

"Your magic..." he said. "Has it returned?"

Loki closed his eyes. Thor observed him a bit more closely and noticed that he still looked peaked and fatigued.

"Less," sighed Loki, "than I would have hoped. The Asgardian sanctions on my magical abilities have forced me to cultivate whatever powers I can from this shabby atmosphere; the action aggravates my more severe ailments and ultimately makes little progress."

Thor sighed, looked at the ground and ran a hand through his mane. He thought back to the moment the Avengers had discovered Loki, grappling to rise from the crater his own body had pummeled into the floor of Stark Tower. Clint had insisted they remain silent and watch Loki struggle until he noticed them. Thor had stood by with an incredible pain in his chest; whatever Clint had suffered, whatever destruction had been ravaged upon New York, Thor would never be able to bear the sight of his younger brother in pain. In that moment of defeat, Loki was living all of the nightmares that Thor had seen him endure in his childhood – dreams laced with images of black ice, the pain of fresh wounds, and the cave-like darkness of confinement. Thor had always watched Loki suffer in silence, crying out in his sleep. But when Loki would wake, he would never speak a word to the young god of thunder, would never reach out to be comforted.

Why, thought Thor, why did Loki insist on suffering alone instead of putting faith in others?

"If I discussed with our father," asked Thor, "the possibility of removing these magical sanctions, would you take advantage of his mercy?"

"Ah, yes," said Loki. "The All-Father's pathetic adoptee, crawling back home after his temper tantrum."

"You mistakenly believe you have a choice in the matter, brother."

"Then why ask what I would do with the All-Father's little handout?"

Thor threw up his hands. "Because your thoughts _matter_ to me! Because I still see you as my brother! Because I _care_ for you! What of that? You insist that your family rejects you while you refuse our aid! Surely you _must_ see the folly in your stubbornness!"

Loki was silent. He stared down at the coin that rested in his lap. He suddenly looked centuries older, wiser; the shadows under his eyes had seeped into every curve and line of his face, every pore, every knuckle. He did not look at Thor when he finally spoke again.

"I have thought about whether I would erase my past." His voice was low, somber, steady and grave. "I am very much like Agent Romanov: there is far too much red on my ledger. Asgard seeks to bury that red, to gild over it and begin anew. But darkness must keep company with darkness; I was born in shadows and to shadows I will always return."

Loki began levitating the coin off the comforter, the veins in his neck protruding with the effort. His voice, however, remained level. "The Chitauri merely cultivated the blight that blackened my soul from its very conception. Where is hope written for me in the tomes of universe, in the scripture of all the things that could ever be? 'Family' is an obscure shape to which I cannot adhere – as is faith. You who have spent much of your life in my presence should see that."

Thor let his hands fall to his sides. As much as Loki wanted to indulge in his own private angst for the time being, he would come around. Asgardian aid was typically given without concern as to whether it would be accepted; if the All-Father decided he wanted to help someone, the help would be given, for better or for worse. Loki _had_ to know this, _had_ to be able to predict that his adopted father would not abandon him unless he accomplished something completely, utterly, and wholly unforgivable. The wrath of the gods was uniquely severe; but the crimes needed to earn such a punishment extended beyond property damage and a handful of Midgardian casualties. As harsh as it seemed towards the people of Midgard, Thor had to admit that wars of more epic scales had killed far less deserving civilians and far greater numbers – and not solely on Earth, but throughout the universe.

Loki's intention on Midgard had not been genocide. Odin knew this, and Odin was not through attempting to raise his younger son, his – Thor acknowledged this without much reluctance – his more intelligent son, his more tactful son. His more _diplomatic_ son, with a silver tongue and a learned mind. Odin was a wise and good king, but he also rarely passed up an opportunity. If the All-Father still held any hope that Loki could be of value to the kingdom of Asgard, he would continue giving Loki third, fourth, fifth chances. Thor knew if was a way for Odin to reconcile his fatherhood in tandem with his royalty, to bridge the gap between ruler and role model.

"I will return in under a fortnight, brother," said Thor, "with news of our father's decision and other tidings from Asgard. I trust that you will maintain the highest standard of conduct until my return."

Thor knelt down beside his brother, leaned in to the side of his fevered head, and said firmly:

"Because rest assured: should you allow harm to come to Jane Foster, I will escort you personally to the Chitauri, and you shall answer to them."

Loki gulped audibly. Thor could not tell whether it was in jest. He turned to the door to take his leave.

"You were correct about Jane Foster," said Loki, almost inaudibly. Thor did not turn around, but did not continue towards the door.

"I do not speak of your remarks on her physical attributes," continued the god of mischief, "but of a quality to which you spoke last evening. She is... what was the designation you used... 'a force to be reckoned with.' There is something... different about her."

"Then you must know how important she is to me," said Thor. "Treating her with respect is your true chance at forgiveness. Do not miss it."

Thor walked out of the lab into the desert.

* * *

_"I can't get no / satiiiiiiisfac-tion..."_

Jane sat in her van in the dirt driveway of the lab and let the song play out before turning off the radio and heading inside with her clean comforter. Loki snapped to attention as soon as she entered, looking faintly guilty as though he had been caught doing something reproachable. The air between them was as tense as a drawn bow.

"Where's Thor?" asked Jane.

"I'm afraid he left."

Jane exhaled sharply. She knew what Loki meant by 'he left,' but she asked anyway:

"Where did he go?"

"Scampering back to Asgard, per usual."

Jane sighed. She felt a little pang of remorse; she knew Thor couldn't stay forever, but to leave without saying goodbye? It was unlike him to miss an opportunity to see her.

"Did he say anything before he left?"

Loki ran a palm gently along the side of his head to calm the messier flyaways. "I assume you're wondering if he mentioned you specifically."

To Jane's chagrin, she felt her face grow hot. She dipped her head and played with the ends of her hair. "Um... yeah."

"He told me that if I were to harm you, or allow harm to come to you, I could expect a great deal of pain in my future."

"To go with the pain you're in now?"

"Something like that." One corner of the demigod's mouth hitched up incredibly slightly. He kept his eyes locked on Jane. She was suddenly thankful she was holding a giant blanket; she would've felt vulnerable without something between her and him... almost naked, somehow.

She broke the nonverbal contact by throwing the comforter on the chair and walking to the kitchen.

"I was going to... uh, make myself some lunch," she called across the room. "Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich? Or anything else?"

"Ah, yes, a crude Midgardian sandwich," said Loki acerbically. "That would work wonders on my internal bleeding."

Jane stopped poking around in the kitchen and turned to face him. "Are you serious?"

"Seriously injured, still, yes."

"No- I mean... How do you know you have internal bleeding? That's not really a diagnosis most people make on their own."

Loki leaned his head back and sighed. "Once more you flaunt your ignorance about higher life forms. I have lived for centuries, and I have fought thousands of battles, and I have been much closer to death than I am now. I have felt the pain of every possible permutation of injuries. Most Asgardians have, with the exception of a handful of cowards and neurotic recluses. In short– I am familiar with the sensation of moderately severe internal trauma."

"Aghh," groaned Jane, exasperated beyond belief. She started toward the cordless phone by the fridge. "That's it: I'm calling you an ambulance and we can get you in some normal clothes before it gets here and cook up a story for the paramedics. I can't fix internal bleeding with Peptol Bismol and Tylenol, and I'm sorry if Asgardians are more 'advanced,' but you would be crazy not get professional help at this point– Wait... what are you doing?"

Loki had gone completely stiff. He eyes were set in rigid concentration over his right hand, which was poised palm-down over one of the smaller bruises on the opposite forearm. He bit down hard on his lip and his eyebrows knit tightly together. Jane walked closer to the couch in time to see the blue and purple of the bruise fade to an almost imperceptible tawny yellow. Loki laid back, panting, sweat trickling down his nose bridge and over his cheekbones. The veins in his temples pulsed at the edges of the compress on his brow. He lifted the hand that had hovered over the bruise and flicked a gold dollar up out of thin air.

"No..." Loki wheezed, "Midgardian... hospitals."

"That was just a tiny bruise and you're huffing and puffing already."

The demigod turned his eyes upward at Jane without lifting his head. "As odd as... this... will sound: you... are going... to have... to trust me."

He lightly snapped his fingers and flipped the coin into the air, concentrating so that it hovered directly in front of Jane's collarbone. Jane felt warmth radiate from its gold surface and... how odd... she could have sworn she felt somehow happier, safer, as though that warmth had spread down through her toes. She looked back at Loki. Magic or no magic, she suddenly and inexplicably had faith that he could take care of himself. A bizarre wave of relief washed over her – relief...?

"I trust you," she said before she knew she'd opened her mouth.

* * *

**The stage is set for these two to spend plenty of quality time together; you'll see bigger, longer, better moments between them in the coming chapters! Yay**!

**And those of you who don't want Thor gone permanently, don't worry, I'm in the same boat. He's a great guy and he'll be back soon. ;)**

**Review if you like what you see or have additional questions! Thanks!**


	14. Chapter 13

**Hello everyone!**

**This chapter's a long one, with pretty much _all_ Loki and Jane moments! One of the most fun chapters to write so far, in my opinion. I hope it shows.**

**Update on what's in store for future chapters: what's up on Thor's end of things? What can Loki do to deal with his family? And what on earth is SHIELD up to?**

**Enjoy this for now, though!**

* * *

Jane had spent three full days and nights alone with Loki in the lab.

At first she thought she might go crazy with anxiety. She couldn't take her eyes off him for more than ten minutes, afraid that if she did he would spring up and knock her unconscious and… fly away or something. He was mostly quiet under the blankets and ice, dozing or manipulating a coin or staring quite intensely into space. Jane had kept up the Tylenol / Pepto regimen because it was a way to keep busy. Loki hadn't recoiled from the medecine; Jane supposed he didn't mind a sense of routine, either.

She'd noticed he healed little wounds first, as though warming up for the bigger jobs. Bruises had begun to vanish from his arms and chest. There was no pattern to the position that he took when he exercised magic. The only noticeable trends were the panting and paleness and sweating. Even though magic seemed to weaken him, however, he remained composed, poised. His eyes took on a hawkishness that almost sharpened their green tint. His posture was flawless, upright until each task was finished.

Jane had only carried on one conversation with him over the entire three days.

"Are you awake?" she'd asked. The lab was dark, the dimmed overhead lights creating long shadows behind the furniture. It was well past sundown.

After a lengthy pause: "No – I sleep with my eyes open."

"Actually?"

Loki scoffed painfully; Jane took it as a "no."

"I can't sleep," said Jane. It was true; she'd been thinking about Garrett, about the house they'd talked vaguely of owning together. About the way he had kissed her – so plaintively, so sincerely, as if he'd been the one begging for _her_ trust. It was all so disgusting now, so stupid.

"What do you expect me to do for your insomnia?" asked Loki. "Does Tylenol heal that as well?"

Jane chose not to fight against the sarcasm. "I was going to take your temperature and then... um... have you ever seen a movie?"

"I take it you're referring to Midgardian film? Most likely originating from a region in California?"

She grinned at his wordiness. "Yeah."

"I have watched a handful. They were trivial imitations of already-insipid Midgardian livelihood."

Jane picked the thermometer up from the coffee table. "Open," she said, guiding the glass into Loki's mouth. "Since I couldn't sleep, I was going," she said, waiting for the red to finish climbing towards her, "to watch 'Titanic.' It's a movie about two people on a ship that sinks. And in the end-"

"Mmm!" hummed Loki urgently, trying to keep the thermometer between his lips while communicating something. Jane removed it and shook it out.

"Something wrong?" she asked, peering at the glass. "One oh one still, by the way."

"If I am to watch this 'movie' per your suggestion," he said softly, raising his eyebrows, "it wouldn't behoove you to spoil the ending for me."

And so they sat, in silence, and watched "Titanic" on Jane's laptop. She pulled her chair closer to the armrest against which Loki's back rested, so neither of them would have to crane their necks. It was the longest period of time she'd ever been this close to him. She stood now and then to get both of them more water, or to get Loki more Tylenol. The demigod's eyes never moved from the screen; his face remained expressionless for the entirety of the film. He did not bat an eyelash or utter a single word until the movie had ended; Jane thought for a moment that he really _had_ fallen asleep with his eyes open.

At last the credits rolled and Celine Dion wailed her closing chorus. Jane yawned with the sleepiness that had finally overtaken her and shut her laptop. She looked to Loki, whose pale face was still quite unreadable.

"Well...?" she asked. She was bursting with curiosity. Surely he had some profound perspective on the movie, some comment about how deities actually predicted such-and-such would happen to the Titanic. But instead he simply shook his dark-haired head and said:

"That was atrocious." He continued shaking his head as though baffled. "There was _ample_ room on that door."

* * *

The next morning – the morning of the fourth day – Jane opened her eyes to see Loki standing at the open refrigerator.

"Hey- _Hey!_" she yelled. "What do you think you're doing? How are you even up? What-"

"Woman, please hush." He glared at her out of tired eyes. His black hair was still disheveled, his movements cautious and pained. "No cause for alarm; I was simply searching for that little pink vial of stomach remedy."

"The Pepto."

"Presumably, yes."

"I thought your ankle was broken."

"I healed it." Having failed to find the bottle in the fridge, Loki moved very slowly and gingerly on to the cabinets. He turned towards Jane and cocked his head ever so slightly to one side. "You really do have extraordinarily little faith in my magical abilities."

"Well, sorry..." said Jane. She wasn't even sure what she was apologizing for.

"In case you were curious, I should be hale and healthy in a matter of days," Loki continued. "And so you see, my magic far surpasses the skills and training of any Midgardian 'physician.'"

"Don't flatter yourself," said Jane, getting up from the armchair. "You look like you're about to keel over."

Almost on cue, Loki sucked in a sharp breath and leaned a shaky hand heavily against the countertop. He banged the other hand against the edge of the sink, seemingly reprimanding his own body for its weakness.

Jane simply stared at him, feeling awkward and helpless. If this was how angry Loki became at himself, she didn't want to know how he'd react to an outside offer of help.

"The Pepto Bismol's in the top cabinet, the one to your right," she chanced, trying to keep her voice calm and assertive.

"I was getting to it," said Loki. But he never got to it, instead sinking down to the floor with his back against the dishwasher. He was trying to steady his breathing, to keep his chin up and seem noble, princely, self-sufficient. He was still fighting both pain and assistance, attempting to claw his own health back up from the ground. It was so incredibly... sad.

Jane couldn't contain herself any more.

"Do you need help?"

Loki closed his eyes. "If you could fetch that bottle from the cabinet and place it near the couch, I will make my way back when I've the strength."

Jane was stung by his stubbornness. How could this demigod, who she'd seen at his weakest hour, still refuse to open up to her? She was done tiptoeing around him. He wasn't a villain anymore; he was a patient. She steeled herself and walked over to his spot against the dishwasher. _Damnit_, she thought, _this is so crazy..._ But before she could think any more on the matter she was seated next to him.

"Look," she said. "You walked a little, and that's great, and now you need help. And I am giving you help – not because I pity you, not because I have to, but because I _want_ to. And If you don't _take_ the help, then you really have no common sense. You'll have all the time in the world to be powerful and impress people with your magic when you're better."

Silence. Loki angled his head slightly towards Jane. She felt her breath catch in her throat. This was the first time she had ever been both close to him and level with him; they were suddenly not captive and observer, not nurse and patient, but simply two people side by side. Jane was reminded of how tall he was – even seated, his head rose a good deal above hers, and for once he shifted his eyes _downward_ to look at her. Jane could make out every pore, every faint line, every mark on his face. His eyes, framed by dark brows on top and dark circles on bottom, were so, _so_ green. With those eyes gazing down his nose and into hers, Jane at last felt the presence of royalty – a royalty born in frost and raised in gilded halls, the perfect blend of rough and regal. Where had this feeling been – this awe at his stateliness, the urge to _follow_ him. A strange image flashed into her mind: an image of kneeling at his feet and reaching out one hesitant finger to skim the edge of his cape, and all the while he would peer down at her austerely and–

Loki broke her reverie by coughing up a fleck of blood that barely made it to his palm.

Jane sighed. "Here's what I'm proposing," she said tiredly. "You can let me help you back to the couch, and I'll get the Pepto. _Or_ you can stay here and do everything yourself, and I will give you nothing. You may have been around for centuries, but you can still learn a thing or two about how dangerous pride is. Look at Thor for Pete's sake."

"I won't bother to ask who Pete is," said Loki. He was either joking or incredibly exasperated. Or both. "I might add that you drive a hard bargain. The fiery Jane Foster I met at SHIELD has returned, it would seem."

"You could say that," said Jane with a soft smile. "You could also say," she continued, putting on her best accent, "'Jane Foster, I will accept your most gracious offer of help getting to the sofa, in exchange for the Pepto I so dearly require.'"

"I _could_ say that," replied Loki, grinning as though proud of her cheekiness. "But instead I shall say: thank you for your offer, I'll get it myself."

And with that he heaved himself upright, grabbed the pink bottle out of the cabinet, broke into a massive fit of coughing and fell directly into Jane's waiting arms.

"Can't say I didn't warn you," said Jane, blowing hair out of her eyes as she struggled to support Loki's weight. "And I appreciate the thanks. You almost said it without sarcasm, bravo."

"Unhand me, strumpet."

"Why, so you can fall down and crack your head on the floor?"

"Oh, you would love that."

"_No_, I _wouldn't!_ Ugh, why are you being like this?"

"Like what– mischievous?"

"Even if you are the god of mischief, this is the wrong time to be wagging it in my face," said Jane. "I'm also not letting you fall, that would be ridiculous. And I would have to clean up your mess, _again_."

"Do not pretend that you haven't enjoyed playing nursemaid. My physique isn't quite what Thor's is, but you never hesitated when removing my clothing."

Jane's mouth fell open. She took a moment to comprehend what had just been said to her, and then drove every ounce of her seething, boiling anger into what she hoped sounded like a harsh command:

"Start moving towards the couch or _I will drop you_." _Wow,_ she thought, _was that _my_ voice? It almost sounded like-_

"Ah yes, please do drop me. I want to see it. Drop-"

Screw it, thought Jane, and she dropped him.

* * *

_Damn, she actually dropped me_, thought Loki as he lay sprawled in a very undignified manner on the kitchen floor.

He had thought that by repairing his mobility he could erase a little bit of his dependency on Jane. He cursed himself for his own impatience. And for his weakness. And for the fact that he found himself waiting for Jane to return to his spot on the floor, to ask how he was faring, to apologize for dropping him...

Loki shook out his head. No, he though, he was content to just rest on the floor alone for a moment. He needed to briefly recalibrate his mind, retool all of the little mantras and though patterns that had been transforming his pain back into a utility. Over the course of the past three days, he had not only been healing his body: he had also been resharpening his wit and his insight. With every injury he healed, he had allowed the harsh and masterly teachings of the Chitauri to flow back into his veins. The magic required was tedious, and Jane's presence had been distracting, but progress had certainly been made. He was finally able to assess each wound objectively, to calculate blood loss and measure recovery time. Lying on the floor as he was now, Loki could discern that it was not pain that prevented him from rising – it was shock:

It had been quite awhile since any woman had handled him so forcefully. And the last woman to do so had been Sigyn.

Loki shook his head again and grunted. Maintaining sanity required that he cease drawing parallels between the two women. It would do him no good. Jane Foster was a tool, he reminded himself. She was an instrument for extra aid in recovery, and he could _not_ continue mistaking her for a companion...

A companion. He had seen her as a comrade, he realized. The little moments he could have chased her away but didn't, the little remedies he had let her doll out, the damned Midgardian movie they'd watched together. Ah, but he had barely even watched the movie. To be certain, he had kept his eyes on the screen, he had registered the (vacuous) plot, and he had made what he thought was a fairly sound judgment on the ending.

But the entire time, in his peripheral vision and through a sort of magical third eye, he had been observing Jane.

The way she twirled her hair between her fingers, the position her lips took on the edge of a glass of water, the quiet tears that had pooled in her dark eyes during dramatic moments in the film – all of these quirks, these minute physical ticks, had been far more captivating than any manufactured piece of media. He had realized that Jane, small and unpretentious little Jane Foster, was remarkably beguiling. Her face, her hair, her small hands–

Small hands that had rudely plopped him on the hard ground in the lab, Loki reminded himself. What a frustrating woman. When was Jane Foster going to realize that she was in the presence of _royalty_, of power, of incredible force?

No matter, thought the demigod. He was forced to admit that his only desire at the moment was the feeling of the couch beneath his sore limbs, and cool pink medecine to soothe his aching guts, and...

"Please let me help you," he heard Jane say, directly above him, softly. Her voiced had a clogged quality that told him she was crying. "Let me help you get back to the couch and I promise I won't bother you again. I won't even talk to you anymore if you don't want."

Something in Loki's chest broke.

It was not a new injury, he reasoned; injuries did not develop from lying prone on the floor. It was an intense pain, somehow keening and dismal and bittersweet all at once. He had only felt anything like it once before in his entire life, in the moment that he had raised himself from the shards of flooring in Stark Tower and greeted the glowering faces of the Avengers. No– he had felt it twice before: once in Stark Tower... and once when the All-Father's "_No_" had torn him to pieces and sent him spiraling from the Bifrost. This was, then, the third time he had felt it.

And this time was the most potent of the three.

Loki felt himself nod through the depths of the pain. Dazed, he felt Jane's small arms roll him onto his back and guide him into a sitting position. He vaguely heard her say, "Can you get your feet under you?" and he stood weakly and allowed her to lead him, step by step, over to the white cushions.

As soon as he was situated on the couch: ice, Tylenol, Pepto. The Holy Trinity of Jane Foster. The trifecta of little excuses for him to look upon her up close, to feel her hands, to hear her voice... Come to think of it...

"You may still converse with me," Loki found himself saying. "I... would not want that to cease."

Jane shook her head and wiped away a tear.

"Get a little sleep," she said, and walked back to the kitchen.

* * *

**Wellll?**

**Review if you like what you read! More soon to come!**

**Thanks guys!**


	15. Chapter 14

**Helloooooo!**

**Some BIG notes to get out of the way:**

**First of all, I'm unofficially referring to this chapter as my "Centennial Review Celebration Chapter"! That's right, over 100 reviews! I have read every single one of them, and I love all of my reviewers and visitors dearly. Who knew this fic would be greeted so warmly? My sincere thanks to everyone who has cared about these characters as much as I do.**

**Another note: I'm very happy to say that summer has pretty much started for me, so while I have commitments like my little part time job and my research, I have so much time for fanfiiiic! ****So I will have no excuses for not updating. And you can call me on that.**

**And ANOTHER IMPORTANT note on "THOR 2": those of you who follow film blogs closely already know this. "Thor 2" is officially in the works, and Loki WILL return, and (according to a guess by Chris Hemsworth) will probably be redeemed! Oh – and Jane will be back as well. So excited. Chances are this fic will be rendered extremely AU once the "Thor 2" script is written, but who knows...?**

**This chapter! It's not as long as the one before it, but it has (a) important Asgard stuff, and (b) some juicy Loki and Jane-ness.**

**Coming soon: where does SHIELD fit in? What's the deal with Sigyn?**

**Enjoy this for now!**

* * *

The gilded beams of the Asgardian throne room threw great shafts of light onto the armored figures of father and son. They each stood: Thor constantly moving, pacing, expelling energy, and Odin All-Father rooted, still, imposing. It was not the first time they had squared off about Loki's misbehavior – and Thor hoped it would be the last.

"I see no reason why I should restore Loki's magical abilities," boomed Odin. "They have brought Asgard nothing but trouble."

"You and I both know that is _not_ true, Father," said Thor. He had been having a difficult time negotiating with the king. There were instances when it seemed as if he and Odin were not father and son, but instead chief and second-in-command. It had always been that way; even the All-Father's most tender moments with his sons had been tinged with pomp and protocol. Frigga had been softer with the boys, as all mothers were wont to be. Still, being in a royal family had its downsides.

"Can we please simply skip to the part where you finally forgive Loki, and bring him home?" begged Thor. "You forget all of his promising traits, all the potential he has to serve the Kingdom of Asgard. He has intellect, Father, and skills."

"Skills he has only used to breed chaos and unrest since he has grown," barked Odin. "I have no interest in encouraging his folly. While I will not hand him to the tormentors that led him down his wayward path, I certainly will not risk leading him _back_ down that path myself. That is why," he continued, taking a shaky breath, "I have decided that while Loki can expect Asgardian protection wherever he goes, Asgard itself shall not open its gates to him any longer." The king dipped his head as he finished speaking. Thor knew he had to be on the verge of weeping.

The news sunk into Thor's gut like a boulder. He screwed up his eyes to prevent his own tears from spilling. He had never expected this from Odin, had never known that the king could be unforgiving. Even after his great blunder on Jotunheim and his banishment to Midgard, Thor had been tested and had been absolved. Now he saw that there truly was a line in the sand, a point past which an Asgardian citizen – an Asgardian _prince_ – would not be welcomed home. He had assumed his father would be merciful – and somehow, he had assumed wrongly.

"That is unfortunate," said Thor, his voice growing quiet, his eyes turned downward, "because I... already hinted to him that he could return."

Odin smacked a broad palm against his forehead.

"Father, if I may be so bold: you forget the power of forgiveness-"

"A forgiveness that Loki never offerred to me."

"After you apologized... for what? For concealing his true parentage his entire life?"

"I was protecting him-"

"I am sorry, Father, but you were _lying_ to him. You planted seeds of resentment that have been reaped tenfold on Midgard. You owe it to the people of Earth to trust that your son may still do good works in the universe."

"You are right, son, you _are_ too bold!" bellowed the All-Father. He threw a hand upward in a wild gesture. "You rashly refused my first offer of aid for Loki; he could have returned to Asgard to receive medical assistance."

"He _still_ can!" cried Thor. "Why do you hold such a grudge, Father?"

"Because, can you not see? Loki has willingly made himself an enemy of this kingdom! He double crossed Asgard and Jotunheim for his own personal gain; he separated himself from us on the Bifrost; and he needlessly allied with one of the universe's most foul races against Midgard, a planet under our protection! There was a time when, as a ruler – as a father – I would have offered Loki my help regardless of whether he might take it; a parent does not turn his back on his child. But Loki is no longer a child – he has come of age, as you have. And he has made a choice about the company he wishes to keep: it is the company of darkness, of misdeeds."

"What if that was not a choice?" Thor pressed. "What if it was a mistake-"

"Then it was a _damn costly mistake!_" Odin roared.

"Enough," called a female voice, strong and final.

Thor spun around to see his mother standing in the throne room's entranceway.

Odin frowned deeply. "Frigga-"

"We rule this kingdom together, the both of us," said the queen. "And I say if my son is in need, then he comes home, and we decide the best course of action after we confirm his safety. We have only lied to him. We confused him. He fell into the wrong hands and he suffered for it – he made another world suffer for it. If we turn him away now and he wanders into more misery..." she wrung her hands together and turned her braided head to the side, "...I do not think I could bear it."

"He is not asking to return home," said Odin. "He does not want anything to do with us."

"Let Loki be the judge of that," said Frigga. "We turn him away now and we will never know what path he may have chosen, given the extra chance." She walked up to Odin and placed a hand on his elbow. "You do not have to fear your own son, All-Father."

Odin bent his head and turned in slightly to face his wife. Thor saw something in the king soften, and he knew in that moment that Loki would indeed be invited back.

"If I may..." said Thor quietly. "Mother is right. Loki is weak and injured – and in the time I have spent with him on Midgard he has shown significant signs of a willingness to repent. Although, the sincerity of those signs may be questionable" he added with a dry chuckle. "This strange 'fever' symptom has addled his brains a bit, I am certain..."

* * *

"Ninety-nine point seven," said Jane, shaking out the thermometer for what felt like the eightieth time – what probably _was_ the eightieth time.

Loki didn't appear to have heard – he was busy juggling coins without touching them. It was the sixth day of his stay at the lab, and he had pulled through pretty well. Jane was now more concerned about the protrusion of his cheekbones than his fever. When on earth had he last eaten?

"Do you think you'll take me up on that sandwich offer soon?" she asked.

"Unlike you – meaning you, the Midgardian – I do not have to constantly stuff my gullet to survive."

"Usually when people snap at other people like that it's because they're hungry," proffered Jane with a little smile.

"Or because they are wracked with internal injuries, take your pick," grumbled Loki, his attention still focused on the swirling coins.

Jane walked over to the kitchen to make herself some lunch. She flicked on the little white kitchen radio and flipped the dial to the classic rock station.

"So, your 'better than Earth doctors' magic not working out so well?" Jane asked as she headed to the refrigerator.

"Patience, Jane Foster. Perhaps I'm trying to procrastinate your sandwich offer, hm? How you could think Midgardian food might actually be appetizing, I cannot fathom..."

"Thor didn't seem to mind it," said Jane, pulling a box of strawberries out of the fridge drawer.

_"And we're nearing the end of our commercial-free hour here on WKXA,"_ said the announcer over the radio. _"Let's get a look at our weather forecast..."_

"That dolt has the tastebuds of an insect" said Loki. "He once ate a bit of Sif's pantyhose I planted in his soup when we were children."

"That's... weird," said Jane, cutting the tops off the berries. "But not totally unlike you, I guess."

"Passing judgments on my character so soon?" quipped Loki, letting the coins fall into his lap. Jane glanced in his direction and thought she might've seen him wink.

"I wouldn't dare," she said with a laugh. "No reason why a childhood prank would lead to any worse offenses."

"Besides perhaps a little rabble rousing," replied the demigod, now grinning from ear to ear. "An army or two, nothing disastrous..."

_"And coming up at the end of the hour here on WKXA, a special news report on the devastation in Manhattan-"_

Jane stopped cutting the strawberries. Loki went stiff as a board.

A sound byte of an elderly woman floated over dramatic music:

_"I lost everything that day... My home... All of the letters my husband sent me back when he was at war... But we'll all heal somehow-"_

"Turn it off," said Loki.

His voice was quiet, as though he was trying to keep himself from screaming.

* * *

"You are to be king of Asgard soon," said Odin, seated next to Thor on the parapet of the palace. "What would you have me do with Loki after he returns home?"

"Are you asking because you want to know the answer," said Thor, "or because you want to know whether I agree with a plan you already have?"

"I simply want your opinion, as his brother." Odin turned towards Thor and smiled wearily. His good eye crinkled into his white eyebrow.

"Then as his brother," said Thor, "I..." He chuckled. "I am afraid you will not like my answer, Father."

Odin gazed out over his kingdom, over Asgard – the seemingly endless paradise of which he knew every tree, every creature, every structure. He sighed:

"When I am gone and you are king, my judgement of your actions shall not matter. Speak your mind, Thor."

"Then..." Thor said, "Then as his brother..." He hesitated again.

"Well? Speak up, boy," said Odin.

Thor took a deep breath.

"I would offer him my seat on the throne of Asgard."

* * *

Loki let the pain of his remaining injuries swallow him. He closed his eyes and let his mental guard down and allowed himself to feel _everything_: every scrap of torn tissue, every bruise, every jagged crack in every broken bone.

He preferred this pain to the one that he had felt as he watched Jane turn off the radio and flee to the van in tears.

This pain was familiar.

He had been fooling himself – permitting himself to lapse into a routine of being comforted, of being given treatment and kindness that he did not deserve. It had all been foreign and beautiful and anesthetizing, and it had dulled his awareness. He was no longer the sharpened blade, the bolt of lightning that had ruptured Midgard's atmosphere fresh out of the hands of the Chitauri. Once sleek and formidable and potent, he was now tired and submissive and tame. Broken by the compassion of a naïve woman. Engulfed by his own sad transgression.

_Pathetic._

Now more than anything, he wanted his aches and pains to crawl all over him and consume him and purge his every last bit of agency. He wanted to molt, to shed all of the selves that had conspired to bring him to this piteous state. He wanted to be reborn from the ashes of the sad catastrophe that was his life, his choices. Reborn into a form uglier, more fearsome, more deserving of the heartbreak – and yes, he had decided, it was heartbreak – that he felt upon seeing Jane Foster in pain.

For she was so, _so_ pure – and so perfect that every sob that tore through her seemed like a chip or a scratch on a piece of flawless ivory. And he was bestial, and defective, and so utterly wrong to loiter in her life, and breathe her Midgardian air, and take up any amount of her time or effort. He could picture her now, the happiness she could have had if he had never shattered her livelihood. Her potential husband, her dwelling, her children, her career. He saw her reaching out her small hand to wipe tears from her child's eye, to accept an award for her groundbreaking research, to comfort her spouse as he lay ill–

Loki felt something land on him. He winced slightly, blinked once, and let his eyes focus...

Jane was sitting beside him, with her head bent and her hand on his middle.

* * *

**Let me know what you think, everyone!**

**Thanks again!**


	16. Chapter 15

**Oh, this chapter.**

**Oh you guys, I can't even...**

**You're just gonna have to read it.**

* * *

"You're blue again," said Jane.

It was true. Loki had curled up with his head facing the back of the couch, and by the time Jane had come back from crying in the van he had turned a bruised shade of indigo. He blinked his red eyes open and looked at her blearily.

She kept her hand on his abdomen. She didn't know where else to put it – she had thought taking his hand would be a little too familiar, too… romantic? And a hand on his shoulder would have been patronizing. But somehow she couldn't bear _not_ to touch him. There were things she wanted to say to him, words that failed her, and for once every instinct in her body was telling her to get close to him, physically.

But this was all so, so insane. The radio had reminded her of that. She, Jane Foster, astrophysicist from small-town New Mexico, was housing the world's most dangerous fugitive in a tiny glass lab. And not just housing – she was _comforting_ him. This guy was a Class A Jerk, a sociopath, and probably could still snap her in two even while injured. He was...

No– no, he was more than those things. He was witty and stubborn, simultaneously confident and self-effacing, quiet, funny... He was _so_ funny in spite of himself. And he had accepted her help, and had watched a movie with her, and had managed to find some common ground with his estranged brother.

He was just... lost.

"Does this hurt?" she asked, looking at where her hand rested. Loki shook his head and blinked slowly.

"Um..." said Jane , floundering, "Look, I just... I really don't know what to say right now. I'm going to... Can I talk to you about Garrett? I just really need to get some stuff off my chest."

Loki made no sign of objection. The blueness was starting to fade from his skin.

"So, I met him when we were both working at SHIELD. I met him my second day on the job. I helped him out with a computer program we both had to use in the lab, and we laughed a little about it, and... he offered to take me to dinner, which was funny because all the employees had to eat in this dark cafeteria and the food was pretty much the same every night, and served on these awful trays and... Anyway... So we went to dinner in the cafeteria and he pretended like it was a fancy restaurant. He was always really good at pretending things were different, which... I guess shouldn't be a surprise considering he was sort of lying to me the entire time we were together. And... We were only together for a few months, but there was something about him– some feeling that I had in my gut that he was the right person for me. And... Okay... I have to admit that I did think about Thor, but he seemed so far away, and imagining him all he way in another galaxy was just... I mean it was really difficult. And Garrett was just, well he was just _there_. There was nothing more to it, no crazy magic and fighting, no question about whether he was going to be in my room when I came back at night– if we'd even been apart at all during the day..."

She lifted her eyes to find that Loki was looking straight at her, seemingly hanging on every word she was saying. It wasn't the menacing stare that she had seen through the glass and the mouthpiece during their first encounter; it was soft, and unassuming, and interested. She opened her mouth to continue, and found that all the words were getting stuck to the roof of her mouth again.

"I'm sorry..." she said, and then laughed a little. "I mean, I'm sorry for _being_ sorry... There I go again apologizing for everything. I always apologized to Garrett. For little things, and bigger things– I was always saying I was sorry even though we never really fought. He was sweet– really sweet, and nothing seemed to phase him. He was the only person in the entire bunker who never let it get to him. And by 'it,' I mean being underground, never seeing family or friends, or sunlight. But looking back, he probably _di__d_ see all of those things. He was probably planted by higher-ups at SHIELD to keep me occupied, to give me something to hold onto, to keep me from asking questions. They knew I was curious, knew I had lashed out at them before. And that's one thing I never did apologize for: taking matters into my own hands. I'm good at doing that."

Loki gave a wane smile; he seemed to be half-listening now, his green eyes focused on Jane's hand.

"You're sure I'm not hurting you," she said, trying to get a good look at his face to make sure he wasn't in pain.

"It would be very difficult for _you_ to hurt _me_," he said gently. There was the tiniest filament of sarcasm hanging on his voice; Jane wasn't sure whether he meant it as a compliment to her gentleness or as a dig at her weakness.

"In fact," Loki continued, sprinkling in a bit of arrogance, "if you could perhaps rub your palm in a nice circular motion... that would be rather pleasant."

After a bit of silence, Jane raised her eyebrows. "Oh," she said, putting on a wounded tone, "so I'm your handmaiden still?"

"I only _requested_ it," said Loki with a tiny grin. "Were you my handmaiden I would have commanded it belligerently. Regardless, royalty typically gets what it requests, as well as what it commands."

"But you're only royalty on Asgard," said Jane. She didn't pull her hand away.

"Must you remind me of my greatest oversight," sighed Loki. He leaned his head back onto the armrest. "Jane Foster?" he asked without opening his eyes.

"Fine, fine, circular motion," said Jane. She was just considering the extreme weirdness of giving an infamous demigod a tummy rub when he interrupted her.

"No, no, I wasn't calling your name to remind you of that. In all honesty I would prefer _not_ being pet like a house cat." He opened one eye, almost playfully, and aimed it at Jane. "In soothe I wanted to pose a long-overdo question... why have you brought me here?"

Jane's heart sunk, and then sped up tenfold. She felt incredibly abashed. Her eyes darted around the room, she swallowed, took a breath, wanted to speak, said nothing, took another breath, and realized there was nothing _to_ say but the truth:

"I, um..." she said. "I actually don't know anymore."

Loki looked as though every major vein in the region of his face might erupt.

"I could have returned," he said, his voice shaking ominously, "to Asgard, where a _fully_ equipped medical staff could have healed me in hours – _hours_. I could have lived out my life on another planet, in my own miserable company, but no– you bring me to this tiny, incompetent _prison_ and for what...? No-" he started, his eyes growing wide, "_you_ are Asgard's punishment, you must be-"

"No! Stop, _snap out of it!"_ cried Jane, smacking her hand instinctively against his stomach. "Ohmygod," she blurted, instantly realizing her error as Loki gasped in pain.

"I am..." said Jane, horrified, "_so _sorry." And now she really was rubbing the wounded area.

"Just try not," said Loki through clenched teeth, "to start blubbering about it."

They sat in silence for a few moments, Loki in too much pain to swat Jane's hand away, and Jane not saying anything out of fear she might cry the moment she opened her mouth.

"I really am sorry," said Jane when she had regained some composure. The hand that wasn't on Loki's abdomen was shaking.

"As much as it wounds my dignity to admit," said Loki quietly, darkly, "the fault lies with me. I was blinded by emotion and spoke rashly."

He turned his eyes toward Jane and then towards her hand. He opened his mouth, as though he were about to tell her to stop "petting" him, but then closed it.

"Dammit," he said sharply. "Dammit–"

"What–" said Jane. She stilled her hand. "I'm hurting you, aren't I?"

"No, please stop being paranoid about that," said Loki, still staring at her hand. His dark brows knit together. "It isn't that. There is..." He screwed up his eyes and turned his head away from her. "Dammit," he said again, softly, tersely. "I'll... take a drink if you have it."

Jane stopped moving her hand again and tried to read his face. "You mean _alcohol?_" she asked. "I have wine, but you're still sick-"

"Do you want to learn more about me, or don't you?" Loki snapped, his voice filled with gravel.

Jane stared. She swallowed. "Why would you think I-"

"You've been nothing but nosy since the moment we met," the demigod said. "Possibly even before that. You have barged into my presence time and time again only to fall just short of truly uncovering anything about me. You are," he said, the faintest shadow of a smile teasing his lips, "the worst detective I have ever met."

Jane felt herself blush. Everything Loki said was true; she could never find out anything of value about him. Every time she had wanted to ask, he had become angry, or had needed urgent medical attention. Or she had been too apprehensive, too humbled by his presence.

Loki shifted slightly so that his torso leaned closer to Jane's. "I am going," he said, the faint smile on his face intensifying, "to let you in on a little secret. If you want an Asgardian to bear all to you..."

He looked down briefly, shook his head, let out a small chuckle, and lifted his narrowed eyes back to her:

"You are going to have to get him drunk."

* * *

Two bottles of Merlot later ("What _is_ this rotgut?" Loki had said, cringing. "Sometimes I truly suspect Midgard is attempting to poison me."), Jane worked up the courage to ask the demigod the most complex question she'd ever posited:

"How does magic work?"

"You are already asking the wrong questions," said Loki. He did not appear outwardly tipsy, although he himself had drunk the entire two bottles. Jane supposed Asgardians had a higher tolerance.

Suddenly Loki winced and brought the heel of his hand to the side of his head.

"I told you drinking was a bad idea," said Jane. "Need an ice pack?"

"No, no," said Loki, shaking his head, "it just... takes a moment for an inebriated mind to comprehend that its body is still injured. Once the drink settles in, however, it's typically a marvelous painkiller."

"I see," said Jane. "So... what questions _should_ I be asking?"

"No one really knows _how_ magic works," said the demigod. "Magic derives naturally from any atmosphere. To ask how it works would be to delve into matters that have to do with the fabric of the universe, and other thorny topics that are best left alone until I am healthy and sober. I will say that some are born with magical abilities, like myself. The better question for you to ask would be 'how does one such as yourself manipulate magic?'"

"Fine," said Jane, uncorking a third bottle. She put on her fake accent again. "'How does one such as yourself manipulate magic?'"

"The short answer is by thinking about it," said Loki. "Focusing intensely on it. The longer answer is that I use a sort of mental mechanism not unlike the Midgardian concept of 'imagination'..."

"I don't get it," interrupted Jane. "Asgardians don't imagine things?"

"Use your head, you probably know the answer to that already," said Loki, accepting the wine glass Jane held out to him. "What do Midgardians imagine? Worlds like _Asgard_. Magic. Alien species. Humans are better at imagining because there is so much more in the universe they cannot know about for certain."

"So you don't picture worlds better than Asgard?"

"There_ is_ no world better than Asgard. And because Asgardians are higher life forms than Midgardians, we know it to be true. We are the best. Unequivocally. It isn't bragging – it's a statement of fact."

"Alrighty, whatever," said Jane, rolling her eyes and feeling a little offended. She decided to pour a glass of wine for herself.

"Don't act wounded by the information, Miss Foster," said Loki. "In fact, you should be grateful. You have the privilege of knowing the things that other people of Midgard do not." He gesticulated widely with his glass of wine and put on an exaggerated 'soothsayer' persona: "The secrets of the universe _can_ be yours, for only two bottles of the worst Earth wine imaginable!"

Jane couldn't contain her laughter. She realized she was incapable of staying angry at the dark-haired bastard. Or maybe it was the wine...

"So, returning to magic," said Loki. Jane could finally see a bit of pink creep into his cheekbones. "At first it happens on accident. In very much the same way that a child learns to walk, any being with magical abilities has an incident – and it could be a very small incident – during which they are made aware of their talents. This could happen at any point throughout the lifespan. Luckily, I have lived for ages with the knowledge that I _could_ manipulate magic, and for centuries with the fully-formed ability to do so."

"So what was it for you?" asked Jane. "What made you realize you were magical?" It felt so weird to ask a question about magic without any irony.

"It manifested itself very early on," said Loki, pausing to take a sip of his wine, "not to me, but to Odin and Frigga." Suddenly his voice became deeper, quieter, as though he were telling a grave secret. "When I was first brought from Jotunheim to the court of Asgard, my Jotun heritage was, of course, fully physically expressed."

And suddenly it dawned on Jane:

"You were _blue!_" she yelled. Loki winced at the volume.

"Erm, yes," he said, twisting a finger in his ear. "My Jotun form – my _naturally_ expressed form – is blue, and red-eyed. And quite icy, as you saw earlier. Size would have been a factor, but that I am probably the smallest Frost Giant ever conceived," he said with a rueful smirk. "To be honest, I never knew much about my natural form until the skirmish on Jotunheim, directly before Thor was banished to Midgard. My first act of magic, then, was unbeknownst even to me until recently: as a baby, I subconsciously masked my own race to blend with the Asgardians. I could shape shift before I could control my own powers."

Jane didn't say a word; she was totally, utterly fascinated.

Loki took a long draft of his wine before continuing. He swirled the drink in his mouth a bit before swallowing, and then sucked air through bared teeth. He worked his jaw back and forth, as though feeling the phantom hindrance of the SHIELD mouthpiece.

When he finally spoke again his voice was low and subdued. He did not look at Jane.

"It was lucky for me that I could become a sort of chameleon in Asgard from the beginning of my stay there. Thor was old enough when I arrived to remember seeing me for the first time – and he never recalled me having been blue when he first laid eyes on me." He inhaled and exhaled slowly, deeply. "I have every reason to believe that Odin and Frigga would have kept me tucked away from Thor... from everyone... until I no longer resembled Asgard's greatest enemy."

Jane stared into her wine glass. Her chest felt heavy.

"I suppose," continued Loki, his voice breaking ever so slightly, "that it would have been for my own protection. After all – what parents would want their child to be mocked, and judged, and feared? Somehow, my infant mind knew that the only way to survive... was to adapt. And keep my head down, and be studious. And never attempt to upstage my older brother. In that way, I think my childhood self may have been wiser than I knew: because the minute I _did_ try to upstage Thor was the minute my life began its monstrous, abominable downward spiral."

Jane did not know whether to feel honored that Loki was sharing this information with her, of all people, or whether to feel guilty that she had drawn it all out of him.

She sighed. She put down her glass of wine and picked up the thermometer from the coffee table – for the eighty-_first_ time. Jane presented the glass rod to Loki, who opened his mouth quietly – the usual procedure, totally seamless and totally routine...

Except for one difference.

This time, as Loki held the thermometer in his mouth and waited for the red to begin its inevitable climb, Jane felt her hand reach out and lace her fingers into his.

"Ninety-eight point five," said Jane. "Your fever's gone."

But she was looking at the thermometer while it was still in Loki's mouth.

She had never let go of his hand.

* * *

**So I promise there will be more side-plot development (Thor, SHIELD, etc.) in the near future. But I think this chapter was important for Lokane. Ya know.**

**Review with questions, comments, congrats, whatever!**

**Thanks!**


	17. Chapter 16

**Guys.**

**I am SO. SORRY. that this chapter has taken so long. I had a lot of parties and finals and god knows what else over the past couple days.**

**But we're back! With a new chapter! And so many more Lokane moments. Again, side plots will come up again in the future... But Loki and Jane gotta get through some stuff first. ;)**

**I'm gonna delve into Norse mythology in a couple different spots in this chapter. If you've read some and my version seems a little off, it's probably because I tweaked it for the purposes of the story. I'm calling it... my own interpretation... hah.**

**Thanks again to my amazing reviewers and visitors. Just... yes.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Loki awoke feeling as though his head had been scrubbed out with fresh sandpaper.

He opened his eyes and instantly regretted it. Light shredded into his senses like a white-hot knife. He squeezed his eyelids shut again and tried to get his reeling brain to form an intelligible thought. Where in Valhalla was he... Or was he _actually in_ Valhalla? No, that was impossible – the valkyries would have laughed him out of the hallowed hall before he could have regained consciousness, those hussies... 'Valiant death in battle' indeed...

And then it hit him like a blow from Mjolnir: Jane Foster's couch. New Mexico. Midday. And...

Oof. Midgardian wine withdrawal. What did humans call it...

"Hungover?" boomed Jane Foster's voice from above.

Ah yes. Hangover.

And a nasty one, from what Loki could tell. His brain was barely functional, his mouth was lined with dead grass, and his already injured head and stomach now felt like they had been pumped full of pig slops. He had drunk his fair share of mead in Asgard, and had suffered his fair share the morning after. But whatever suffering there had been was always brief; Loki's remedy for alcohol withdrawal was – literally – magical. And as such, it was the envy of all the other Æsir oafs who could never put their mead where their mouths were.

No magic cure here on Midgard, though, unless he wanted to bother amassing it organically. And that would most likely take more time than it would to simply wait out the symptoms...

_Symptoms! _Loki could kiss his own sluggish brain for remembering that there was only one thing Midgardian medicine was truly good for, and that was treating symptoms. He slowly, painfully peeled one of his eyelids back and let his vision focus against the blaring light. Sure enough, Jane Foster was busy organizing her little nurse's station on the coffee table.

It was the first time, Loki realized, that he had ever opened his eyes and been truly, wholly _grateful_ at the sight of the little wench. He was just about to request a hearty dose of pink potion when another realization hit him...

He was drenched in what had to be perspiration. Instead of asking for Pepto, the demigod felt his dry mouth rasp out:

"Why am I soaked to the bone?"

Jane twirled to look at him. There were telltale signs of fatigue on her face as well, although her demeanor seemed chipper. She reached out and laid the back of her hand across his forehead. The touch was lukewarm and soft, and for once Loki did not have the urge to swat it away.

"Your fever broke," said Jane. "You sweat a lot when that happens... It's where we get the phrase 'sweating it out.'"

"Then why do I feel like I still have it?" Loki thought aloud, wincing at the volume of his own voice bouncing about in his skull.

"That would be the hangover," answered Jane. "You're just probably dehydrated. Drink this," she said, offering a bottle of unnaturally blue liquid. So blue, in fact, that it may as well have been the Tessaract in liquid form. Loki was at once fascinated by the color and repelled by the fact that under normal circumstances he would not consider it beneficial to his health to drink the Tessaract.

He gaped at the bottle, and then narrowed his eyes. "Midgard is like that story, is it not? The one where the young girl goes to a strange land littered with bottles that read 'Drink Me.'"

"This isn't Wonderland," said Jane, laughing. To Loki's ringing ears it sounded like a cacophonous cackle. A strangely... pleasant cacophonous cackle. "It's New Mexico. And this is Gatorade. Drink up, Alice."

"Don't blather so loudly if you can help it," Loki grumbled, taking a swig of the blue juice despite his better judgment. Any liquid, regardless of its alcohol content, seemed vastly unappealing at this juncture.

"You seemed pretty open to talk last night," said Jane, walking back over to the ridiculous black liquid machine.

"_Tell_ me I didn't say anything rash," said Loki. He brought a hand up to pinch his nose bridge; the movement instantly made his head spin.

"I guess it depends on your definition of 'rash'" said Jane, fiddling with the little paper filters. "You talked about magic, aaaand your brother, and your parents, and your Jotun form..."

"All mortifying topics, go on."

"And then we, uh, held hands..."

"Say that again."

Jane paused at the machine and dipped her head. Her dusky hair hid her face, which Loki was certain had to be flushed.

"Yeah..." she said. "We held hands. Well– I held _your_ hand, you were sorta out of it."

Loki closed his eyes. The dull throb that had started in his temples was now gradually intensifying.

"We are going," he wanted to say, "to carry on as if that hadn't happened."

But he could not bring himself to say it; he suddenly felt as though his jaw were once again muzzled, his words stoppered by shining gunmetal. He opened his eyes and gazed over at Jane, who suddenly seemed so... charming... with her damned mug of damned coffee, and the little ringlets of wayward hair the brushed her shoulders, and the way in which her top teeth worried her lip when her eyes met is, as if she were containing a gleeful little secret...

_Nonono_, Loki repeated to himself. _Suppress the urge to see anything differently about this woman, you're recovering from being drugged._ His registered his pulse quickening. He blearily wondered if during his whole stay she'd been dosing him not only with medicine but also with some sort of pheromones, or a bizarre aphrodisiac–

The blue draught.

"_What is in this?_" he hissed, wagging the bottle at Jane and dizzying himself further.

Jane started. "Jeez, I don't know, it's just Gatorade. Sugar... electrolytes...? Look at the bottle if you're that curious."

Loki attempted to even out his breathing but deep inhales only aggravated his middle. Blast, what a senseless question, he _knew_ what was in Gatorade. In fact, he realized, he had probably known everything about every substance Jane had offered him over the past week. He saw no reason why his centuries-acquired knowledge of Midgard should not extend to beverages. Loki frowned deeply. Why would he submit himself to denial about Midgard? What reason could his brain possibly have to put up walls, blocks against information that would have otherwise been inherently accessible? Illness, perhaps, was a factor, and fever, and a primary lack of magic.

And then Jane Foster took a warm, dry washcloth and began tenderly wiping the sweat from his brow. And awareness came and lifted the haze from Loki's mind...

It was _her._ His mind had allowed him to remain ignorant so that he could give Jane some role in his life – so that he could keep her around, helping him, healing him, feeling useful, answering questions, learning about him.

Loki's memory warped and flashed back to the portrait of Jane as he had first seen her. In her dark jacket, peering at him through glass, face fraught with worry, and some sort of disgust, and more than a little bit of fascination. The first and only soul to visit him in his silvery confinement, she had stood before him seeming small and timid... and somehow so _brave_, so wonderfully bold and fresh and young and new. So... so open-eyed, taking everything in, wanting something from him that he couldn't even place if he tried.

And standing there in her denim pants with her hair mussed, and tears beginning to flow from her big, round eyes... she had broken him. Loki's concentration had flagged, his mental defenses had been stripped. Pain, _real_ pain, visceral, tangible pain had engulfed him and had told him that this Midgardian girl was making him _feel, _genuinely, instinctually, completely. He felt physical pain, had felt it whenever he had seen her since – but he knew it was more than that...

Jane had made him _sentimental_.

"Hey," said Jane, as though sensing his distress over the discovery, "is there something wrong? I mean... besides the fact that you probably feel pretty crappy."

Loki could have said a million things in response to that question. _I don't feel well enough to try to use magic, I'm uncertain as to what Asgard wants with me, I am a weakened refugee on a planet I tried to overtake, and I am very, very frustratingly bemused as to how I feel about the woman who has helped me against all odds._

He simply blinked, sighed, and took another pull from the Gatorade.

"It has been a long several days, I suppose," he said.

* * *

Seven hours later, Loki finished his first meal in a very, very long time.

What he had said to Jane earlier had been true; higher life forms, especially those capable of magic, did not truly need food for sustenance. Foodstuffs did, however, serve as a wellness booster. Anyone who ate meals regularly was bound to feel and look healthier anyone who abstained.

Depravation of food had been another way in which the Chitauri had sharpened him. A mind that could withstand and wield pain, joined by a completely self-sufficient body, would form the base of an incredibly stalwart and powerful machine – a hollow and armored conduit for the most potent dark magic, chiefly, the Tessaract. And Loki had been grateful to not have any food in his stomach when he'd made the first jump to Midgard via the Tessaract; it had been his first real, full-fledged encounter with the cube's formidable power, and the moment he'd hit the metal floor of the SHIELD lab he knew whatever sustenance he may have consumed would have been quickly and violently expelled. In hindsight, it would have blighted a near flawless entrance. Who would have taken him seriously as a potential ruler if he had been lying in a puddle of his own sick during their first encounter?

Had it happened during his entrance to Midgard, vomiting would have been an entirely new experience. The digestive tracts of Æsir and Jotun bodies were typically strong enough to withstand most anything – and food on Asgard was simply never contaminated, unless someone found a reason to very deliberately poison an enemy. Even in cases of poisoning, however, one's system typically either combatted the offending substance from the inside or succumbed to it. There was never a great deal of in-between; making a mess by expelling toxin orally was just not pragmatic.

On Midgard, however... Loki could not keep from shuddering inwardly... On Midgard all of the tables seemed to have been turned. Loki was forced to admit that if there was a time in his life that he might ever, _ever_ vomit, it would be here on damned Midgard, weakened and without magic, and having just consumed a meal for the first time in weeks.

It was utterly terrifying.

Still, the term "meal" was really a bit of an overstatement. Loki had eaten a bowl of vegetable broth Jane had provided, which had been smooth and warm and relatively unoffensive. Solid food was not a safe bet until he was completely healed. After he had finished the broth and had ascertained that he would not be sick for the time being, Loki sat back and once more began the irksome task of trying to scrape magic out of thin air.

Every so often he would emerge from his meditative state to glance over at Jane.

How did she manage to perpetually occupy herself? She flitted around like a dark hummingbird, cleaning here, cooking there, fiddling with her electronic devices, checking up on him... Loki had to admit how interesting it was to watch her. In all his life, he had never been so intrigued by the quotidien activities of another person. Watching Jane now, he felt as if his entire existence had been rushed, a hectic swirl of activity, and she was the eye of the storm. In the back of his mind, Loki was constantly conscious of the fact that SHIELD might be looking for him, that Odin and Thor and Frigga were deliberating over his fate – but the moment he laid eyes on Jane, none of it seemed to matter.

Jane wiped down the countertop and moved to throw the dark wine bottles in the wastebasket.

"Good riddance," Loki said. Jane turned around to look at him, wearing a little smile across her pink lips.

Loki tried to calm his heart as it thumped against cracked ribs.

"Yeah, sorry about how bad that wine was," she said. Loki let his ears take in every single word, carefully, thoroughly. Her voice was silky, light, ever so slightly husky. Even that silly phrase seemed effortless and graceful. "Merlot really sucks," she continued. "This girl who interned for me left it here, Darcy. She bought like ten bottles of it because it was on sale at the only liquor store in town."

"She has discerning taste," Loki replied, trying not to recall the cheap burn of the drink as it had slid down his throat.

"Yeah, she was something else," said Jane. "She was even more forward than me, if you can believe it." Jane walked over and sat in the armchair near Loki's spot on the couch. "You probably would have been interested to meet her."

"I think one Midgardian woman in my life is enough for now, thank you," Loki said. He realized he was grinning as he spoke.

"Well sir, I'm honored," said Jane, feigning formality. She clasped her tiny hands on her lap.

Loki's throat began to dry up. He took another sip of Gatorade and could barely taste it. His heart continued to thrum in his chest.

"So..." said Jane slowly, "there was topic we never got to last night. I know you're hungover, but I just... I feel like there wasn't closure on something."

"You want to know why," posited Loki, trying to keep his voice from croaking. "Why conquer Midgard, and throw so many lives off balance, and manipulate an inferior race."

"Actually, not really," said Jane. "I kind of stopped caring about that."

She moved her chair a little closer and Loki had the odd sensation of being cornered. His skull swam.

"Can you tell me about Sigyn?"

Sigyn.

Loki found himself unable to think straight. Jane Foster should have asked him anything, _anything _but this. Jane had been a constant for him, a haven, and suddenly he felt so unsafe, so wretchedly vulnerable in front of her. Loki's mouth and eyes watered and something in his stomach felt wrong.

"Why not," he ground out, "just go read the mythology? It's all there, everything-"

"No, not everything," pressed Jane. "That's why they're called 'myths.'"

"You want to know?" rasped Loki, feeling his face grow hot. He bored his eyes into hers. His hands trembled and he clutched at the edges of the couch cushions. His brain felt like it could implode.

"Yes," said Jane. She looked frightened. _Good_, Loki thought, willing himself not to care whether Jane was happy, _good, let her be frightened._ The room spun and his throat felt clogged but he fought against it and spat out, voice crackling, words nearly running into one another:

"I was wedded to her, we were young, it was arranged, we had two children, and after I ordered the death of my half brother Baldr one of those children was made by Odin to kill the other, and Sigyn was made... she was forced to play a role in my torture, which nearly..."

Loki's nose ran, his mouth tasted awful, his head dribbled cold sweat, his breath hitched. "And I blamed her for it, for everything... And she never..."

Suddenly Loki's guts lurched and he felt something strange and warm blaze up in his throat, and he had just enough time to register the tears in Jane's shell-shocked eyes before his chest clenched and he leaned over the side of the couch and vomited.

* * *

Jane sprayed carpet cleaner on the rug and watched the white foam cover everything. She couldn't look at it, and she couldn't take her eyes away. There had been blood, oh God... She felt faint and sweaty. She kept bringing her hand to her mouth and choking back sobs.

"Allow me," said Loki, polishing off the last of the glass of water she'd brought him. He furrowed his brow and concentrated on the pockets of foam, and Jane had barely blinked before it had all vanished, leaving the carpet pale and flawless.

"I don't know what to say," muttered Jane between sobs.

She looked at Loki through her tears. She thought she might be having a panic attack. Why, why had she asked such an awful, stupid, selfish question?

"Just know," said Loki wearily, his mouth drawn tight, "that Asgard is not everything Thor has told you about."

"I know," said Jane. "I know now... I'm just so sorry..."

Loki shook his head slowly and sighed, "We are more different than we often let ourselves think, you and I."

He looked up at her where she stood by the couch. The corners of his eyes were red, and dotted with the tiniest flecks of moisture.

"But Jane... do not apologize."

* * *

**That's it for now! More SHIELD and Asgard hopefully in the next chapter** – **and I think we may finally see Loki fully up and running again...**

**Review if you have stuff to say! Thanks again, everyone!**


	18. Chapter 17

**Everyone!**

**Sorry for the wait for the chapter again! You're all troopers. I had to do a lot of editing on this since it has more chunky paragraphs and difficult narrative bits. **

**But it's here! Part flashback to Sigyn stuff, and SHIELD updates! And what kind of author would I be if I didn't throw in some Lokane? **

**NOTE: To prep for writing this chap, I did a little research on Viking wedding traditions and the scripture from which those traditions derive. Honestly there's not a ton out there. I took what I could, and embellished and used my creative license and came up with the stuff you're about to read. I hope it's as interesting to read as it was to write!**

**I wanted to call out two reviewers in particular, Ink and Eyesofemeraldgreen, to whom I can't reply via private message from the reviews page. But I just wanted to say you two are awesome and I've been reading your reviews and I think you have great things to say!**

**And of course, thanks to all my readers/reviewers/visitors. Rock stars, all of you. **

**Enjoy!**

* * *

_"Brother," said Thor, "I do not know what cause you could have to be nervous! This is a joyous occasion!"_

_Loki couldn't tear his eyes from the tall looking glass in his chamber. His reflection wore thick, deep green formal attire, sewn with heavier fabric and embroidered with far more elaborate designs than his everyday wear. The extra ornamental chains felt like they might choke him. He tried to breathe evenly and deeply, but his chest felt tight and his cape seemed to weigh him earthward. _

_He rubbed a final strand of dark hair into place with a bit of wax. He knew he looked pale, and flushed, and frightened. It was all so unbecoming of a groom – of a prince, no less. Still, he felt a little cold fear was warranted. He had despised his first arranged marriage and he was not looking forward to this one. Odin thought him such a diplomat, such a fine example of Asgardian tact and savoir faire. According to the All-Father, Loki would make an ideal husband: faithful, intelligent and perceptive. It did not matter that Thor was Odin's first born; Thor was far too _busy_ for marriage at the moment. He was undergoing crucial training for the field of battle, crusading for the integrity of the kingdom, "On, for Asgard!" and all that. No... Thor should not have to bother with the vexing formality of wedding for anything other than love, or passion. It was a liberty that Loki was never offered, because he was "mature" enough to make the sacrifice. "You are the only one capable of bearing this specific burden," Odin had said. "You understand, my child."_

_Weddings. A joyous occasion indeed._

_"Thor," Loki posited, throwing a sideways glance at his brother, "if Father were forcing you to wed at this very moment, how might you react?"_

_"I would see it as an opportunity to celebrate," said Thor, clapping a brawny hand on Loki's shoulder, "our royal family's good standing with the nobility of Asgard. And I would hope my brother would stand by and support me."_

_Loki sighed and dipped his head. "Would that you were in my place, then."_

_"But brother!" exclaimed Thor, so deafeningly that Loki jumped. "You should be honored that Father chose you to represent our Kingdom in this historic moment! And for a second time, no less." _

_"Ah yes," murmured Loki, "please do bring up Angrboda. Because I simply adored being wedded to a giantess for several decades."_

_"Angrboda was... honorable!" bellowed Thor. He elbowed Loki playfully in the ribs. "And statuesque, if you catch my drift." _

_"She _impregnated_ me," seethed Loki, glaring daggers into the older god._

_Thor cleared his throat and mumbled, "Well, Odin didn't know it was going to work that way-"_

_"_Thrice._"_

_"And look at how lovely your children were-"_

_"I gave _birth_," Loki cried, eyes wild, veins in his neck popping, "to a _god damned snake!_"_

_A small, dreadful silence followed._

_Thor's eyes squinted. He pursed his lips but failed to contain the chortle that burst through them._

_Loki gaped at his guffawing older brother, livid, baffled, and..._

_Dammit, but it really was hilarious._

_Moments later, both brothers were leaning on one another for support, wiping tears of mirth from their eyes and gasping with dissipating laughter._

_"Oof," panted Thor. "Let us hope your marriage bed is half as taxing as our hysterics!"_

_Loki whipped out with the back of his hand and snapped Thor across the waist, smiling broadly. _

_"In all honesty, though, Loki," said Thor, straightening up fully and cupping a hand close to his brother's neck, "Sigyn seems like a wonderful woman. Winsome, witty and confident. And if she does possess those qualities... you will be her perfect match."_

* * *

"Wait," said Jane, doubling back to glance at the kitchen counter. "Where did that sandwich go?"

Loki, perching a little haphazardly on a tall stool by the countertop, turned his pale eyes skyward.

"Wait... Wait..." said Jane. "Wait..."

"I'm waiting," said Loki in a cool sing-song timbre.

"You _ate_ the whole thing?"

"I _am_ quite tall," posited Loki. "Let alone a god. It only makes sense that I should be able to polish off a flimsy Midgardian nibble."

Jane was shocked. True, Loki had been healing himself for over a week now – but his stomach had just never seemed to be getting better. And she hadn't seen how drinking three bottles of wine and subsequently bringing up blood could've helped matters. When she had helped him (after much persuading and needling on her part) get his tunic back on the next day and walk over to the kitchen for a sandwich, she certainly hadn't expected him to wolf it down in a matter of minutes.

"I thought you were... you know..." said Jane, fiddling with her hands.

Loki raised an eyebrow and lowered his elbows down onto the counter in front of him.

"You know..." continued Jane in a very small voice, "I thought you're intestines were bleeding... or something."

"Last night I mended them significantly," said Loki, studying his nail beds. "There's a great deal of bruising still, but I don't think anything is leaking into any cavities at the moment. I decided I would leave my skull for the finale."

"You're fixing the thing that houses your brain... last?" said Jane skeptically.

"It was," replied the demigod, flicking his eyes up at her, "the lesser of two evils." He tossed Jane a small grin. "Stomachaches are, as I've heard you say over the past few days, 'a bitch.' Additionally, the internal blood loss was becoming detrimental."

"I guess that makes sense," said Jane.

"Of course it does," said Loki. "Now if you would be so kind," he said, lowering himself gingerly to his feet, "as to point me to your commode, I really must wash up. For certain my odor is not befitting of a prince."

"Um, yeah," said Jane. "The problem is... I don't have a shower here. And I, uh, sold my trailer when I thought I was gonna be moved to SHIELD housing for awhile. I've been... sneaking off to the little fitness club in town."

"Ah," said Loki, "yes, a little box full of mortals flopping about on tedious machinery."

"Sure," said Jane, feeling a little stung. "Yeah, you know, we don't need to get fit learning to fight trolls with– magic sticks or whatever."

"Pity," retorted Loki, his eyes flashing. "While I do not have Thor's obscene bloodlust, I must admit the thrill of battle is largely unparalleled."

"Until you _lose_," said Jane, allowing herself a smug grin.

Loki reeled his head back and clutched at his chest as though wounded. "O, Jane Foster!" he remarked. "Your words slay me! Here I had completely _forgotten_ that I had been bested by Midgardian fancymen in catsuits and a green eyesore!"

Jane chuckled dryly and moved to grab the keys to the van.

"Come on, let's go," she said. "You do smell bad."

* * *

_Her hair was darker than his._

_It was the first thing Loki's eyes had been drawn to when she entered the Asgardian throne room. He had thought his own hair quite dark, but Sigyn's was the black of obsidian, the blackness of the cosmos. It fell about her shoulders in broad curls, shining so that it threw glints of light from the chandeliers and into the eyes of onlookers. Her lips were the red of persimmons, to match her crimson gown. She stood erect, noble, her face unreadable, her black eyes shimmering._

_She was, in a word, imposing._

_Loki did not move a muscle. He kept his eyes fixed on her and his hands pressed into the hilt of the sword standing before him, the point of its jeweled scabbared boring into the floor of the dais._

_The All-Father and his mother stood behind him. Thor stood on the other side of the platform, to his far right. The entire throne room was packed wall to wall with the bodies of __Æsir and nobles and other well-to-do allies of Asgard. Once in a while a whisper bloomed forth from the throng, but otherwise only a single horn, playing a wedding song that Loki had always found oddly forlorn, wormed its way to the tall ceiling and bounced off the gilded walls._

_Loki felt as though every organ in his chest were trying to squiggle up through his throat and out of his mouth. He subtlety clamped his jaw and focused on the red silhouette of his bride as she approached. _

_She was not of full __Æsir blood but of some mixture of houses of Asgard, and nobles who had migrated from another distant star and had sought refuge in the realm eternal. These nobles had spent centuries amassing power and standing in the shadow of the ____Æsir. Loki had seen Sigyn, several centuries older than him, struggle through her family's meagre beginnings to gradually become the heiress of a small yet impressive fortune. As a young prince in the Great Library, he had caught glimpses of her black hair bent over some ludicrously thick tome. He did not know much about her, other than that she was whip smart, extremely loyal to her kin..._

___And now that he had seen her full on, quite beautiful._

___Her beauty was not entirely surprising. While it was not a criteria for demigod status that one be exceptionally striking, it was a general rule that a woman who had risen from anonymity to the bride of an Asgardian prince could not have been all too shabby. Even Angrboda, who had been full frost giantess, had been one of the_ least_ ugly Jotuns Loki had ever seen at the time he had married her._

_This Sigyn, though. This Sigyn in the close-fitting red gown with all its jewels, and the little pearls woven into her dark curls, and the rouge on her lips and her high cheekbones... She was like a painting in black and red, the product of a fever dream or a beautiful nightmare. There was even more to her, Loki thought, than met the eye. Something secret, something hidden–_

_Perhaps even something dangerous._

_As she continued her ascent to the dais, Loki's mind dribbled and wandered. His vision lost and regained focus sporadically. He thought how she might have looked better by Thor's side; red was more Thor's color, after all. He ruminated on Odin's having selected her as his bride, to appease her now-wealthy family, to ensure that their efforts in Asgardian society were not overlooked. He hoped to all the gods, including himself, that there would not be some catch to her physiology that would once more leave the child bearing to him. _

_Loki hadn't the faintest idea what he was getting himself into. He knew it, Odin knew it, Frigga knew it... Thor was probably oblivious to it, but in a benign sort of way..._

_And suddenly Sigyn was directly in front of him. _

_She reached out a pale hand and beckoned to her attendant, who brought forth an impossibly delicate sword, clearly of value more for its craftsmanship than for its utility. An ornament, a tribute of her family's Asgardian patriotism. She held it out horizontally, each end perfectly balanced on one index fingertip. She lifted her inky eyes, first to Odin, then to Loki. After receiving a small nod from each, she knelt and placed the sword at Loki's feet. Her attendant swept and rearranged the billows of the red gown around her kneeling form. _

_Loki stared down at her as she slowly, gently, _gently _extended__ one slender finger to stroke the very tip of his velvet cape. Loki, per tradition, reached down with a finger of his own and delicately tipped Sigyn's chin upward so that her eyes met his. For an instant he thought he saw something waver in her black irises, a tiny flash of deep... despair. But in an instant it had gone, and she was standing, and he was presenting the Asgardian sword to Sigyn's attendant, who took it with a brisk nod.__  
_

_The god of mischief couldn't help but steal a glance at his mother. Little tears dotted the corners of her eyes. He sighed inwardly at her exaggerated emotions. How could she not weep? She was, after all, his mother, and the goddess to whom married women turned for help. She loved weddings, and loved her son, and..._

_Loki's breath caught in his throat. Frigga's expression had abruptly and drastically darkened; the tears that fell from her eyes could not have been of joy but of profound grief. She appeared so distraught that creases had etched out sharp crevices in her noble face, and a shadow had obscured her teary eyes and–_

_Loki blinked and the grief was gone, vanished. The goddess seemed overcome with joy._

_A chill ran up Loki's spine as he looked back into the eyes of his bride. He suddenly felt ill, hypothermic, wrong. The red of her gown and her lips was too red, her eyes and hair were too black, her skin too white. When her lips peeled back and she began speaking her vow, her voice was too deep, too sticky, too velvety._

_Her words made Loki's brain buzz. Suddenly he couldn't make out what she was saying. The entire room seemed to whiten to the color of her skin. Loki's head reeled, he reached out for a tendril of magic to center him but found only static. His heart hurtled, his tongue shriveled, black spots bloomed and swarmed on Sigyn's face–_

Wait, _thought Loki woozily_, black spots...? I must be...

_And he heard someone in the crowd scream, and his mother gasp, and felt Sigyn's hands dart out to catch him as he crumpled to the floor of the dais._

* * *

Agent Maria Hill was sprinting through the hallways of the SHIELD headquarters.

She had always thought sprinting through hallways of government facilities had been a thing only people in movies did. Granted, she had been doing it often enough over the past few months. If she could, she would have punctuated each blustery entrance with a brusque shout of, "Sir, we gotta contain the president!"

But the SHIELD higher-ups usually had a hard time taking a joke.

Plus, she had to admit that if there were a time to be serious, it would be now.

Or Agent Coulson's funeral.

But mostly now.

"Movement, sir..." she panted as she leaned on the doorframe of the control room. "We caught movement of an unidentifiable energy source... In New Mexico..."

"Unidentifiable, Agent?" said Nick Fury, walking swiftly over to a gleaming SHIELD interface. "Meaning your team has no idea as to what it could be."

"Well, not exactly, sir..." said Agent Hill. Shit, she was so bad at breaking news like this. What the hell.

"The physicists down in that bunker, the one you pulled Foster out of..." she continued. She drew in a deep breath. "They say it's pretty similar to what we were seeing in Stuttgart."

Fury straightened up and stared at her dead on. She hated it when he did that.

"You're telling me this looks like him."

"If by 'him' you mean Loki, then yes, sir."

Fury shook his head, sucked his teeth and blew out a sigh. After a long pause, he shook his head yet again and said vacantly, looking at nothing:

"Ho-ly shit."

* * *

**Coming up: action! Adventure! How does SHIELD, and Asgard, and Thor and Loki and Jane all fit together? What was up with Loki's crazy magic spikes in the desert earlier?**

**Thanks again, all!**


	19. Chapter 18

**This is a _long_ chapter.**

**Half Sigyn-mystery, half Lokane! It's pretty trippy in the beginning, so bear with it. It's rewarding, I promise. **

**Sorry for the day-long gap between the last chap and this one, hopefully the length makes up for it!**

**Once again, my reviewers and visitors are invaluable. Thanks for being so committed to this with me!**

**Enjoy, guys!**

* * *

_The earth is black tar, liquid soot._

_It bubbles and gasps and spurts and swelters. Your feet sink in the molten ground up to your ankles. The touch scalds your flesh to the brink of numbness. You wrench your brain away from the pain and tear your leg out of the muck._

_Your foot is gone, smoldered down to an ashen stump._

_Your foot is a massive conglomeration of clotted tar._

_Your foot is gone, smoldered down to an ashen stump._

_You foot is–_

_A shriek. Unbearable desperate marrow-curdling._

_He is wailing from his grave beneath the slurping, heavy depths. Your brother, Thor, no, not Thor, your other brother – pounds, tons of ash packing him down, down, compressing, crushing..._

_You never met him. His face, hollow-eye-socket-leprosy-scarred-jagged-horror-mask, gaping at you from the future._

_You find your foot buried in your lungs and hack it out and offer it to your brother's face and your brother wilts away into melted black wax in front of you–_

_A finger, bony and calloused, digging and gnawing its way through your ear and into your brain until you hear your mother-father-brother-betrothed saying._

_"Awaken."_

_He felt his eyelids snap open like frog's tongue darting at a fly. Everything was shrouded in massive olive blobs. He dimly heard his own voice croak–_

_"Where is Baldr?"_

_Another voice fluttered and undulated from the farthest corner of the universe._

_"He is away at battle. I am Odin All-Father. Do you know who you are?"_

_His lips were burning._

_"Loki Odinson." Could that voice _really _be his own?_

_"Good, my boy, good. Do you know _where _you are?"_

_"Asgard... Healer's."_

_"Yes, yes," Odin's voice seemed to reverberate through a long, hollow glass tube._

_"Now, Loki," he continued, "you are very ill. You had an accident. Do you remember what you were doing before you lost consciousness?"_

_Consciousness... lost...? Accident...?_

_"Everything is green..." His own voice again. How off-topic._

_"Loki, please, try to remember–"_

_"Why is everything green..."_

_"_Loki Odinson!_" the voice boomed. "_What were you doing before your accident!_"_

_"Husband, please, do not shout so–" A new voice, feminine, regal, broken._

_His mother. Mother. Crying. Crying at the..._

_"Wedding," Loki felt his scorched lips move this time. "I was... my own wedding..."_

_"Good, good. Very good. Loki, I will let you sleep in a moment, but you to tell me one more thing."_

_"Yesyesyes," Loki heard his voice rush out. A fuzzy hazy hotness was beginning to shove out his hearing._

_"My son– you need to say your wedding vows."_

_"My..."_

_"Your wedding vows."_

_"Weddings... Weddings..." Loki began. No, that was wrong. Agh, his lungs were full of pitch... No... No, that was wrong as well..._

_No. Sigyn. I..._

_"I, Loki Odinson, take you Sigyn Tryggson, to be my beloved. I will always cherish, honor and obey you, my love, my wife, in these lands, and in the world after."_

_"Good," said Odin's voice, bleeding into the whir of Loki's ears. "Good."_

_A sudden sob pealed from the corner. Female? Male?_

_Loki could feel his arms now. They were... They couldn't..._

_They were strapped down._

_Something was very wrong._

_Wait–_

_"Inasmuch," said Odin quickly, "as you have stated the vows which now bind you together in your love and, by the giving and receiving of gifts, you have pledged yourself to one another... I..." the voice began to short out, "...partners... marriage... now share... kiss as..."_

_And Loki felt a weight on his blazing lips, soft and light and so, _so_ mercifully _cool_. So cold, so blissful, so... sleepy..._

_The sobbing from the corner did not stop until darkness had completely overtaken him._

* * *

Jane Foster was more nervous than she'd been before her SATs.

It made sense, she supposed. Smuggling an infamous villain into a small-town fitness club (of which he was not a member, no less) was a little bit more stressful than penciling in bubbles. And the fact that "Bad Moon Rising" had just come on the radio didn't help matters.

The infamous vilain in question seemed to be in higher spirits than Jane was by far. Loki had reclined in the passenger seat of the van with his legs apart and his hands draping off the armrests, like a king slouching in his throne. He even managed to make the ungainly blue ice pack he'd perched on his dome look somehow like a crown. He winced a little with each bump of the van, but his expression was open and his pale fingers tapped the window ledge in time to the music.

There was something so uniquely... adorable about the whole picture.

"What are you smirking at?" asked Loki.

Jane startled. Either she wore her emotions on her sleeve or Loki was as much the god of perception as he was of mischief. "Oh," she said, "just, uh... glad to see you're feeling a little better...?"

"Better, yes," said Loki, his eyes fixed on the road before them. "But if you're pleased now, you should wait until you see me at my best."

Jane felt her face flush up from the neck. "If your 'best' was your rampage on New York, then I think I like you better now."

"So you were fond of me before?" teased Loki. "Now you're slightly _more_ fond of me?"

"Don't push your luck."

"Luck is for gamblers and empty-headed dreamers. And dolts. I make my own fortune."

"And how's that working out for you?"

A little silence. "Bad Moon Rising" was reaching for its final notes. Jane thought for an awesome, fleeting moment that she had "won" the conversation. But Loki spoke up again:

"Actually significantly better than it would have without your aid."

Jane felt her chest melt. There was something she needed to hear in that confession, something more than just a confirmation of her usefulness. Those few words were a talisman, a suspension of disbelief: Loki couldn't be a dangerous fugitive, he couldn't be a godly prince from outer space, he was a _person_. She couldn't bear to think of him any other way. Not right now, after the past few days. Not after everything they'd said and shared. And certainly not while driving him to a damn fitness club.

Now more than ever, bringing Loki practically fully healed into a public place, she heard the keening whir of paranoia in the back of her brain. His identity and his abilities teased her, whispered out to her from his place in the passenger seat. They'd teased her at lunch. Sitting at the counter in front of his finished sandwich, relatively able-bodied, no longer prostrate on her couch, shooting out quips a mile a minute, Loki had prompted a shift in status, a role reversal. For a desperately, strangely sad moment, Jane had felt as though there was a literal glass wall separating them again, and she was crawling to him, clueless, small, meek. He looked all the more regal and imposing for his healing injuries, his fight against pain that would have killed anyone less potent, less gifted. She had seen that same look in his eye in the containment cell: the wariness, the altertness, like the glint of a steel trap. Fever and pained had dulled it during his stay at her lab, turned it into something human. But now it was creeping back into the timbre of his voice, his body language, the way he looked at her.

She held her breath and shifted her eyes from the road to glance at the demigod, but he was looking out the window. Desert plants rushed by. The radio tingled.

"Strange," Loki murmured, "how mortals see all kinds of signs from the natural world as omens. '_Bad_ Moon Rising.' As if the moon rising could possibly be a different phenomenon from one evening to the next. Lunar cycles may vary the shape and size of the thing, but by now you must all know you're seeing different manisfestations of an unchanging object. Instead, you bundle all your emotions up and toss them at the first thing you can personify. You constantly use nature as a crutch when you are unable to cope with hardship. It must be exhausting."

"You don't have omens in Asgard? Superstition?" asked Jane.

"Superstition in Asgard is tangible," Loki replied. "Our dreams are not the product of our memories and psychology; they _always_ mean something, predict some imminent tidings. Some of the Æsir possess the power of prophecy even when wakeful. Frigga is among them."

"What about you?"

"My magical specialties lie in other areas. Still, I do have more vivid and prophetic dreams than many inhabitants of Asgard. Thor always called them my 'woman's intuitions.'"

"Could you have seen this moment before it happened?" asked Jane.

"Well, now... That would have ruined the pleasant surprise."

Jane could feel his eyes watching her in her peripheral as she drove. They made the the hair at the nape of her neck stand on end.

* * *

_Loki contemplated raising himself on his elbows in bed._

_He tried to execute the idea and failed miserably, collapsing in a sweaty, strung out heap on the pillow. His torso tingled and his brain fizzed with sickening doggedness._

_"I am," he sighed woefully, raking his fingers back through his wiry hair, "an utter catastrophe."_

_"Aha, but brother," proffered Thor from his place at the god's bedside, "you are a _wedded_ utter catastrophe!"_

_"Wedded, yes. To a noblewoman whose family must be thrilled at the prospect of her tending to a spineless sack of gelatine who is yet too weak to consumate the marriage."_

_"Dear Loki," said Thor, laying a heavy palm on the bedlinens. "Even when confined to the healer's chamber, your words never fail you."_

_"They fail me now," Loki grumbled, "in that they cannot conjure any strength, any magic, and frankly any proportional solution to this mess."_

_"The greater problem now, brother, is your health and safety," assured Thor. He paused, on the precipice of something difficult. "Did Father ever reason as to what may have happened yesterday?"_

_Loki blew a puff of air out of his lips. Sometimes he questioned whether Thor could handle certain information - the older god's brain could be remarkably sieve-like at times, and at other times would clench onto ideas so fiercely that he wound up pacing the floors for hours._

_This, however... This he most likely deserved to hear._

_"I know exactly what happened yesterday," Loki said flatly._

_Thor's white-lashed eyes broadened._

_"I am trusting you with this information, Thor- meaning that it is not something I have publicized or shared with anyone else. It regards the integrity of my bride and if you are wise then you shall henceforth keep your trap shut about it."_

_Loki waited, listening to the hornets' nest in his skull, for a sign of protest from Thor. Nothing._

_"There is something about Sigyn," Loki continued, "that emits a sort of magical-atmospheric chaos. A glitch, if you will. I felt as if my own powers had been turned against me; I was weakened and confused and possibly on the verge of hallucinating. It was all reminiscent of the time we had overdone it a bit in the mead halls and I had attempted to make everything in the room disappear."_

_The memory drew a little smile out of each brother. To be young, and quasi-immortal, and never in the mood to question one's own abilities. Loki knew it was a phase from which neither of them had fully emerged. They were both adults but nestled their youth close to their hearts, so that they could only share it with one another. The little pranks, the now-and-again adventures with liquor, the winks over the feast table – it was these small, seemingly insignificant moments that Loki most cherished with Thor. And it was these same moments that dwindled and spluttered every time Odin unwittingly played them against each other – every time Loki was paired off with a bride or Thor was sent out to battle._

_"It affected Mother, too," Loki continued, feeling the weight of his body sinking into the cool sheets. "Unless it was a hallucination of my own... I saw Mother _seeing_ something before I went under. __It'll all a little bit of a blurry mess now, unfortunately."_

_"You are certain is wasn't something or someone else in the throne room," said Thor, scratching his blonde stubble._

_"Of course I'm certain," Loki snapped. He rolled his eyes halfheartedly. "Recall that _I'm_ the one with the magical abilities."_

_"So Sigyn disabled you purposefully? That makes little sense," said Thor._

_"I _know_ it makes little sense, Thor, that's why I'm not divulging it to anyone else. It's too jumbled right now, it bears pondering before I rattle it off to Odin and Frigga."_

_Thor fidgeted. He open his mouth, closed it, wrung his hands together. "Have you pondered it at all yet?" he asked quietly._

_Loki sighed. "Yes. Most likely it was an accident. Some inexplicable combination of her lineage and her manner of dress and the relic she offered me. Magic is temperamental; the catalysts for an unwanted spike in magical activity often remain unseen, unpredictable."_

_"Is there another alternative?"_

_Loki knew Thor was suggesting that Sigyn was an enemy, a danger to Asgard. If there was one thing Thor was good at, it was taking action against potential threats. Putting wrongdoers in their place._

_"There is always another alternative," said the god of mischief. "Sigyn is not an unlearned woman by far. She has labored twice as hard, and with twice the acumen of any noble I've known, to learn about the royal household and its patterns of ruling. There has never, in all the eons of Asgard's existence, been a wedding within a world, Asgardian to Asgardian. It is happening now, to her, and she must see the significance. The question at hand is: what is she expecting to gain personally from this marriage? She has not made herself plainly visible to Odin for naught. What does she, Sigyn, want from us?"_

_"She wants to honor her family," offered Thor._

_"That is never enough," replied Loki._

_"Why is it not enough?" said Thor. His voice was fraught with agitation. "When is_ family_ not enough-"_

_"When you're not an idiot!" barked Loki. The exertion made the ceiling spin. He made a mental note not to shout again._

_Thor cleared his throat. "I know you care about our family, brother. And I know you are no idiot," he said plainly._

_Loki closed his eyes and let his head find equilibrium. He spoke quietly, moving nothing but his lips:_

_"I dreamt of Baldr when I was out yesterday."_

_A sniffle. Thor was crying now. Wonderful._

_"What did he say?"_

_"He said nothing. It was incredibly disturbing. There were... Strange images. I only saw his face, and what I saw __of it was... mangled. Almost unrecognizable. I heard him... screaming. Pleading. I had a sharp, unmistakable intuition that he was trapped somewhere very frightening and that... and that I was to blame."_

_"But how could you be, brother? Baldr is away..."_

_"I don't know," Loki said with what he hoped was finality._

_"And Sigyn... Sigyn has never..."_

_"No," said Loki. "No..."_

_He squeezed his eyes shut against another dizzy spell. This marriage would be the death of him. Curse it._

_"No... Sigyn has never met Baldr."_

* * *

"Okay," said Jane. "I brought you some gym clothes. Shorts and a T-shirt. I figured it would help you blend in."

"Jane..."

"So when you walk up to the counter, Cecile – that's the receptionist's name Cecile – Cecile is gonna–"

"Jane..."

"...She's gonna ask for your membership card, and you should say something like–"

"_Jane_."

Jane stopped talking. She felt something on her arm. Loki's hand was on her arm.

Wait.

Loki's hand was on her arm.

Wait.

And his eyes were looking into hers. The gesture, the white hand on her arm, the cold glint of his eyes, his stern expression, the way he held his head lower than hers so that he looked _up_ at her. It was all so unfamiliar, and yet... so reassuring. He was a firefighter on the ground, two stories down from the window of the burning building from which Jane was about to jump – and he was telling her he would catch her. Jane felt her body give itself over, her muscles relax, her heartbeat slacken.

Wait. He was doing this on purpose. He was _doing_ this to her. Jane had just enough time to register that she wasn't controlling any of her physiological reaction to his hand when Loki spoke, low and smooth:

"I will need you to follow me inside, Jane. I cannot promise that you will not feel the effects of what I will do to the people in the room. If you trust me, as you said you did earlier, then you will subscribe to the belief that no harm will come to you."

"Are you going to hurt anyone?" Jane heard herself ask. Less out of concern, more out of curiosity. A reflexive, instinctual and meaningless question.

"Not if I maintain control," said Loki. "And you and I both know I never lose control." He grinned, quickly, almost wickedly, and then let the grin disappear. "But sincerely, Jane. This is nothing I cannot manage. And you have no cause to worry. You least of all."

Jane nodded. She felt Loki's hand peel away from her arm and reached up instantly to touch the spot where it had rested. _All this for a shower,_ she thought absently. _ I could have just bought a loofa and cleaned him off myself when he was sleeping..._

Now where had that thought come from? And why... why... why was it so pleasant?

Jane's head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. She jumped out of the van, her limbs heavy, and witlessly followed a fully-armored Loki into the glass front door of the gym.

Cecile, small, blonde and desperately trying to hide her age beneath a tan, was filing her nails at the reception desk. Behind her, a small handful of people ran and rowed and lifted on the sparse collection of machinery. The TVs lining the walls of the bright, open room blinked and flashed. Most of them showed commercials.

"I am going to be using your lavatory," said Loki, simply and boldly, "to wash myself. I expect this will not pose any inconvenience."

The cotton in Jane's head thickened. She saw Cecile look up from her nails, gape at Loki in pure shock... And then suddenly all the muscles in the woman's face slackened as though she had taken eight shots of cheap tequila. Her eyes glazed over. She smacked her lips together and pointed a long red fingernail toward the back of the gym.

"Straight back to your left, sir," she slurred, a dumb smile painted on her frosty pink lips. "And might I add that you are looking _fine_ today."

"Most kind of you, madame, although you really are stating the obvious," said Loki, with a little lopsided smile. And he reached out, took one of Cecile's gnarled, tanned, red-nailed hands and planted his chapped lips on it. Cecile let out a drunken squeal of delight.

Jane's jaw dropped.

Loki released Cecile's hand with one final glance into her stupefied eyes. He rolled his shoulders back languidly and strolled past the treadmills and ellipticals and rowing machines. As he passed each unwitting gym patron, their movements slowed. They seemed to have been submerged in molasses. A man stopped running and was flung off his treadmill, and lay rolling on the floor with a blissed-out grin. A college-age girl lowered her free weight and sat cross-legged, staring into space. Jane stood by the reception desk, blinking, blinking again, feeling like she'd walked into someone else's dream. Or like she _was_ someone else's dream. Her eyes floated around the room, looking at the machines, at Cecile's nails, at the TV... The TV... The news was on, and a little red ticker tape scrolled over the bottom of the screen... What did it say...?

Jane felt her eyes bug. Her mouth dried up. She knew what she was looking at, but her frazzled brain couldn't wrap itself around what it meant:

"THIS IS NOT A TEST. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION FROM THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. NEW MEXICO CITIZENS BE ADVISED. LOOK OUT FOR SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY IN YOUR AREA. ANYONE REPORTING STRANGE LIGHTS OR SOUNDS, CALL–"

"I see it. We're leaving," Loki's voice barked. He sounded like he was miles away. She started and looked to find him standing right behind her. His dark hair was still dripping, and patches of suds clung to his face. His eyes were wild and frantic, his jaw clenched.

Jane felt confused. She looked at him, and back at the TV, and back at him. "But... we just got here..." her tongue felt slow. She struggled to form more words and then–

Loki shot one arm out, grabbed her around the waist and carried her out of the fitness center.

_Wow_, Jane thought thickly. _He _does_ smell better._

* * *

**Comments? Questions? Reactions of shock, and awe, and wonderment?**

**Review!**

**Coming up: Thor/SHIELD/Lokane action! How does the Baldr situation work out? **


	20. Chapter 19

**Ahh I posted this so late! I've been typing it on my iPad and my iPad does _not_ like this site interface. It kept autocorrecting everything to "popover." I can't even.**

**Reviewers and visitors, all hale to you! Seriously, there's been amazing comments. You are all so encouraging, if I could dedicate this to anyone it would be to you. :)**

**So disclaimer - slightly less Lokane than previous chapters. But this chapter brings the first part of the Sigyn mystery to a close, so that's important. And there's some ACTION. Oo!**

**Really my overall goal for the past couple chapters has been to resculpt Loki a bit, to bring him from where he was in chapter one, and even the chapters after. I want him to go from ANTIhero to antiHERO, if that makes sense. Hah. **

**Enjoy!**

* * *

_L__oki took in the absurd image of his wife fluffing his pillows._

_He'd heard of the ominous Midgardian vow "in sickness and in health," but frankly he hadn't expected to get to that point so quickly with Sigyn. Still, he reminded himself, this was not exactly sickness. It was regeneration. Recalibration. The bizarre juxtaposition of leaden limbs and lightheadedness, as though his body were trying to obey the laws of physics in two separate universes at once. He would be right as rain after another good day's rest; it was all more tedious than painful. And the presence of Sigyn burdened the situation with awkwardness. His incapacitation only lengthened and intensified the dull and clumsy limbo between an arranged marriage and its consummation. Sigyn had been present and attentive, doing little things to help him on his return to well-being - but Loki knew she sensed the same gap he did, the same disrupted link in the chain of "newlywed" events._

_She wore a close-fitting burgundy gown now. It was far less elaborate than her wedding attire, but still bore the heavy, wealthy shine of brocade and the luscious sheen of hammered silk. Her liquid-black hair was in a neat, long braid that snaked down her corseted back. Her flinty, inky eyes seemed to vibrate in their sockets whenever she looked at him, as though they contained little earthquakes, or tiny galaxies being shaken into existence. Even with her plainer dress and her relaxed, open body language, she was like molten wax oozing frenetically down the sides of a roaring candle – pearly and mesmerizing, but potentially hazardous. Soft on eyes, but scalding to the touch. Her voice was as low and sticky-sweet as Loki remembered it from the ceremony; there was a husk to it that shaded every phrase with perceived irony, as though everything she said were a double entendre._

"_How are you faring?" she asked. _

_It could have meant seventeen different things. __Loki cleared his dry throat and answered anyway:_

"_Suffice to say I'm not at my best." He shifted a little, adjusting his back against the poofy mass of pillows propped behind it. Thor had insisted on carting at least five extra over from the healer's when Loki had been moved back to his own chamber. _

"_Let me be the first to say, then," said Sigyn, leaning in and taking one of Loki's hands in both of hers, "that I cannot wait to see what your 'best' is."_

_Loki raised his eyebrows. He had to admit it was rather amusing, this fresh new bride propositioning her husband like a bachelor in the mead halls. There was a definite forwardness to her – not the brusqueness of Sif or the directness of Frigga, but something more subversive, almost playful._

_She was mischievous._

_And Loki knew two could play at that game._

_What game, though? Loki suddenly recognized that Sigyn's proposition had cornered him, challenged him - threatened him? He shrugged inwardly and told himself it was a product of magical aftershock: any paranoia was a survival instinct. All of his frayed and spooked nerve endings were jolting his mind into constant fight-or-flight. Needless to say, flight wasn't an option at the moment._

_Loki felt sweat beading on the very fringes of his hairline. He attempted to comb his subconscious for some sort of deeper intuition about this woman. Had he encountered her in his dream about Baldr? What was she doing in the moment he'd seen Frigga's countenance darken? Were there any notable symbols, inscriptions, dedications on the hilt of the sword she'd offered him?_

_Sigyn reached out and brushed a wayward strand of hair from his forehead. Loki flinched at the touch, popping out of thoughts that now seemed like machinations, overreactions. This was all ridiculous, there was nothing requiring that Sigyn be dangerous because she'd caused him to swoon at the alter. How could she know she had done it? And even if she _had_ brought it all about purposefully, how could her abilities have slipped by any number of the extensive background checks that Odin had mandated? After the Agrboda-triple-pregnancy incident, the All-Father was certainly not going to let his son walk into another biologically hazardous union. And yet..._

_And yet here he was. Bedridden before the marriage had even become legitimate. The All-Father did not let Loki's incapacitation stop the wedding, either; he had wrenched his son out of a semi-comatose vision so that he could get the vows over with. Unless he had fallen prey to unfathomably bad luck (in which he did not believe, regardless), Loki was at last forced to admit that something was decidedly off about the whole business._

_And if Loki knew something was off, then he was certain Sigyn knew as well. _

_He saw it now. The little ministrations she'd given him to keep herself busy, the overblown attempt at sexuality, the empty questions..._

_She was hiding something._

_"You are probably wondering why I seem so uncomfortable around you," Sigyn's voice bled._

_Loki practically jumped off the pillows. Was this her natural response to the ungainly silence, the slip of a newlywed desperately groping for a conversation topic? Or was she playing him, gambling, attempting to confirm his suspicions?_

_It was sort of beautiful, Loki thought as he opened his mouth, to start a marriage by lying to one's spouse. Beautiful in that it maintained the natural order of things, of marriages somewhat necessarily burdened by secrets – the carousel of "wedded bliss" that had stayed open long enough for Loki to buy another ticket and climb back on._

_"Honestly," he lied, "I assumed you were simply ruffled by the goings-on at the ceremony. As was I– well, both physically and mentally, that is. I do apologize; we haven't exactly started off on the right foot."_

_He was bluffing with the best. He almost laughed, inwardly. Even the gods couldn't seem to nail down the institution of marriage._

_"I apologize as well. In some way I feel that _I_ should have been the one fainting... That is usually the woman's area of expertise, after all." A little smile stretched her crimson lips. It disappeared suddenly though, replaced by a dark frown. "It is really," Sigyn continued, her voice hushed, "more that poor man who worries me."_

_"Thor frets over me far too much," said Loki. "As soon as I'm on my feet he will forget he was ever anxious."_

_"I was not referring to Thor, Loki." Sigyn turned her eyes toward his. They were lit with concern, searching him for a recognition of some sort._

_Loki was honestly baffled._ Baldr?_ he thought. No, there was absolutely no way Sigyn could have seen his dream. She actually knew something he did not. If this were a trap, he would either willingly walk into it for curiosity's sake__, or he would make up some vague line and steer away from the subject... What to do..._

_Sigyn's eyes gushed their disquiet into him and he felt his resolve splinter._

Curiosity may have killed the cat,_ thought Loki, _but cats have nine lives, after all. _Not flawless reasoning, but an excuse as good as any._

_He asked._

_"Pardon me," he said, trying to sprinkle concern into his voice, "but I'm not aware of what you're referring to, exactly."_

_"Loki..." Sigyn said, almost pleading, begging him to know what she was about to say, to relieve her of the burden of having to say it. Little tears flickered in her eyes, like dying stars in the blackness of galaxies._

_She shook her head, looked down at the hand she was holding, looked back up at him, and said shakily:_

_"At the ceremony, as you were fainting, you... you killed someone."_

* * *

"What the _hell_ was that all about?" said Jane. She was still groggy and dense from Loki's magical mind-melt at the little "fitness club." He may, in hindsight, have overdone it a bit. It had been worth it at the time, to see the mortals drool and fall from their useless "technology." He'd missed the glee of a good rampage.

Attempting to drive an unwieldy Midgardian vehicle was the opposite of gleeful. A good, light Chitauri flyer would have served them much better in their current situation.

Their current situation being that they needed to flee to the desert and hide from SHIELD headhunters.

It had only been a matter of time before SHILED had caught his scent, especially now that his magic had been returning. In his feverish, pained state he had risked invisibility. "Bad Moon Rising" indeed. If anything, he himself had made it rise.

Loki attempted to send out a magical probe, to feel out the geography of the land and find an empty space – a task that should have been easy, considering deserts were mostly comprised of empty spaces. The headache, however, fuzzed everything over – a hot, dark, stabbing cramp that blanketed his entire skull.

Jane had been right: he should have healed his head before his abdomen. The "lesser of two evils" was now a direct hindrance to cognitive functioning. Blast his pain-driven lack of pragmatism. To add insult (and additional injury) to injury, his not-one-hundred-percent-healed stomach was starting to protest from the physical exertion of rushing from the gym and carrying Jane to the van. She had been light, even for a human, but bruised organs were merciless bastards. They were reminding him, to use a Midgardian sporting expression, that the ball was still in their court.

"Hellooooo," said Jane drunkenly, tapping him wildly on the shoulder. "Are you gonna answer me? Hey!"

"Hush."

"No! I won't hush!" Jane frowned, probably realizing that she actually had nothing more to say. Loki could feel her unfocused eyes staring him down.

"Your nose... is bleeding," she said slowly.

"I know."

"Hey... Your _ears_ are bleeding, too!"

"I figured as much."

"You're _probably_ gonna _die!_" she said, with all the triumph of a child showing a parent a turtle she'd caught in a nearby pond. And then, immediately grasping the weight of what she'd just said, she burst into big bubbling tears.

"Nooooo," she blubbered, her breath hitching. "I didn't mean it please... don't diiiiie!"

"Please," sighed Loki, "stop. Truly, if you want me to live, don't contribute with your wailing to whatever is sending blood streaming from my orifices."

"Ew, gross!" sniffled Jane. "You're gross."

"I am many things," replied Loki, clenching his teeth through a jolt of cranial anguish. "You will have to put up with those things until you can be rid of me."

Jane contemplated this. She sniffed again and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

"I..." she said helplessly, "I don't want to get rid of you."

Somehow, suddenly, the headache didn't seem all that threatening. Loki looked over at Jane Foster, whose dusky eyes were glazed and her little nose puffed from the recent tears. A small ping fretted at his chest, a staccato pluck of some long-forgotten emotion. He felt his eyes settle into the warmth and wonder of just _looking _at her, studying her - an action that was so familiar and so novel at the same time... He lost all concern for the road and just–

Suddenly his entire body was subjected to the force of being throttled through a shattering windshield. He felt himself being tossed through the air among the scattered, bloodied shards for moments that seemed like years, watching Jane's bruised form in parallel flight, the guardian angel of all car crashes...

...and then he pounded down into the dirt, inches away from the black SHIELD van he had smashed into.

* * *

_He had killed someone._

_Killed. Kay-eye-el-el-ee-dee. _

_Killed._

_Loki hadn't been expecting that._

_Even as one half of his brain did sickening, frantic loops trying to wrap itself around the information - the possibility that he could have _actually killed_ someone - the other half was steadily and meticulously calculating his next move. Should he give Sigyn total shock, innocent disbelief? Denial? No, she knew he had killed in battle. The fault here probably did not lie with him - he did not want to seem desperate. There was something about the way Sigyn had said it, too - "_you_ killed someone" - that automatically pointed a finger. The grief in her voice coudn't obscure the word choice. He wouldn't give her the satisfaction of seeing him beg for forgiveness._

_But wait- "pointed a finger..."_

_The dream. _

A finger, bony and calloused, digging and gnawing its way into your ear-

_"Loki, did you hear me?" Sigyn said, one iota of volume above a whisper. "Do you remember it at all?"_

_Loki decided to feign a little extra weakness. A good buffer, a little false wooziness to hide the calculations going on behind his eye sockets. _

_"I..." he pretended to struggle with the words, raising a shaky hand to his head, "I... remember... a scream. From out in the throne room. And my mother gasped... And you caught me... And I woke up briefly..."_

_Suddenly, an actual spurt of realization: "My arms were restrained," he said. "Tied to the bed." _

_"I know," said Sigyn, eyes still glistening with tears. "I'm sorry, we just... Your father, I mean... He decided he could not take any chances. You understand."_

_"No," said Loki, actual irritation bursting to the surface, "I'm afraid I do not understand. I am not going to beat around the bush any longer. We are, for better or worse, a married couple. Tell me what happened. Everything."_

_Sigyn squeezed his hand. Ah, Loki thought, if she is feigning affection then she is doing so quite aptly. Her touch was... sincerely comforting..._

_"Your father said after it happened that it was a magical... accident," said Sigyn. "It all came to pass so quickly. We were at the alter, and I was saying my vows... And very abruptly your face whitened... For a moment- The color change was so drastic I thought you... you may have actually died, right then and there. You sort of... spasmed once, seized up. And we all felt it- this peculiar tingling wave of.. some kind of force. It was very fast and very powerful and very painful. And those of us standing in certain places caught it more than those standing elsewhere. Your eyes just... rolled back in your head and you went to the ground and I just-"_

_Loki felt a frown deepen between his eyes as Sigyn spoke. Somewhere throughout her speech he had stopped calculating, stopped trying to analyze her inflection and her syntax and word choice and where her eyes were looking. He was seeing something far more extraordinary taking place: Sigyn, hardened and seductive and imposing, was breaking down. She was melting, weeping, struggling to speak clearly. He still did not know what her overall intentions were, her grand plan, if there was one - but he knew she felt genuine remorse, genuine sorrow over this turn of events. The pressure of both her hands squeezing into his, her head bent imploringly over his lap... This was eagerness. _

_This was loyalty. _

_"The man we found dead," she said when she had gathered enough composure, "he was a count from a small town in the mountains. He... Oh my... His... His face was... Well... It was gone. It was like it had simply... Oh..." She closed her eyes tight, breathing quickly, trying to maintain some kind of authority. She was fighting._

_Loki was seized by the impossible urge to kiss her on the mouth. _

_It was a frantic, fiery, flailing urge, springing from a mental nowhere - and he quelled it by instinctively taking his free hand and laying it on top of both of hers. There was something about the joining of all of their hands, some pulsating... power that seemed to emanate from the pits of the knuckles, the tiny warm pockets and crevices of flesh where they were joined. _

_"Do not feel the need to tell me any more," said Loki softly. He meant it. He was suddenly too fatigued to continue talking. He saw all the disturbing parallels to his dream, the face, the finger, the pitch darkness of Sigyn's eyes. But they just didn't bear thinking abiut now, here. He was wedded. They needed to move forward, even if forward turned out to be some bizarre, dangerous direction. _

_"What's done is done," he said. _

_Deep in the pits of his chest, however, Loki knew that wasn't true. _

* * *

Enough, thought the god of mischief as soon as his brain was cognizant. I've had enough of Midgard. Officially and terminally.

He inhaled sharply and let all the pain of all the old wounds and all the new wounds run its course, skitter over his bones and muscles and careen through his head and stomach. He let it _be _for a few entirely hopeless, wildly uncaring, spiraling moments...

And then he thought of Jane.

He vaulted - _vaulted _himself off the ground with a willpower billions of times more potent than magic, a desperation trillions of times more maddening and gripping than any threat by the Chitauri.

Yes, he admitted. He was thinking in numbers now, Midgard style. Measuring his anguish, labeling his fear.

He coughed, splurting strings of blood into swirling dust clots, limping and dragging himself like a wounded wild animal over the churning surface of the dirt ground. He spit sand from his runny mouth and held his head and squinted into oblivian.

Jane, Jane, Jane, _Jane. _

_Jane. _

_Jane. _

Jane was curled there in front of him, trying to sit up, hacking, sobbing. Oh gods, it plunged a dagger into his chest to see her like this. What... What was he even doing... What needed to be done... Agh, Jane...

He could not bear to think anymore. Were his eyes wet? Why were his eyes wet? He shot his arms down and scooped her to his chest. Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane oh Jane stop coughing please, please stop coughing Jane...

Loki felt his feet pound the earth. "Protect your head!" he heard himself rasp, at the top of his gasping lungs. He saw Jane's arms fling up over her skull and almost on cue heard the static pop of gunfire. Wretched mortals and their wretched cowardly guns. Jane, Jane, Jane...

A searing, freezing burst of impact smacked into his lower back. Somehow he heard the shot seconds after. He stumbled, flagged, almost dropped Jane, cursed, saw stars, ran, stumbled...

Another gunshot, this one louder, lower, but...

No, it wasn't a gunshot...

It was thunder.

* * *

**I think someone's back from Asgard. ;)**

**Or are they...?**

**Tune in soon for what all this is about!**

**Thanks!**


	21. Chapter 20

**Yayyy new chapter! If I could name this one, I'd go with "Drama in the Desert." You'll see why. Hah.**

**Thanks again to my reviewers, who are just... You guys are so _smart_. You pick up on things that are really only in my subconscious when I write this stuff. It's so gratifying to see that I have fans that notice the little planting-and-payoff I've been doing along the way... So worthwhile to have such invested readers. :)**

**So yeah! More action, more Lokane, more Thor (which I know a lot of you were waiting for). And I have a hunch you'll all like the ending of this chapter...**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Thor ripped through Midgard's atmosphere in a frazzled jumble of static and clouds and debris. It was a kind of transportation he was very unused to, the in-between, and he harbored a strong distaste towards it. He considered it to be a sort of instant karma: he had shattered the Bifrost, he would have to learn the strange new rules of the alternate route. When Loki had appeared on Midgard months ago, Frigga had shown Thor how he could use Mjölnir to help him carve his way through hidden pockets of space. Learning the skill had been incredibly taxing and using it always made his brain hurt. When he landed with a hearty thud in the New Mexican desert, all Thor wanted was a Midgardian breakfast. A cup of coffee. Make that two cups– no, a _jug_ of coffee.

And eggs with... What was that called? The sun facing upward? Sun at the sky...? The solar side... not down? Something like that.

And a muffin.

And _waffles._

And– By his own hammer, this was quite a scene! Midgardian vehicles everywhere, and smoke, and sand twirling about, and...

"Brother!" Thor tried to yell, but it came out as a croak. What a bother.

He coughed some dust out of his throat and only ended up spraying it over his tongue, which he then tried to wipe clean on his chin but only licked his own beard. Loki was stumbling and crying out a few feet away from him, looking about ready to keel over and dump Jane Foster in the dirt, which wouldn't do at all. SHIELD agents in dark garments crouched behind their vans and fired off their tiny popping weapons. Cowards.

Mjölnir, thought Thor with a grin, knew just what to do with them.

He raised the hulking hammer and whipped it about his head, feeling its familiar tug, hearing it hum as it strained against his wrist. It always made his head tingle in the best way, this winding up for destruction. And if Mjölnir ever _deserved_ to destroy, now was the time.

Thor grunted and lashed his forearm out with a heavy swing of his elbow. Mjölnir bucked from his grip and shot forward with a metallic whoosh. Big loud crunching noises could be heard as the SHIELD vans met their doom, smashing into one another and blowing the cover of the agents behind them. Thor thought for a few, forlorn moments he may have recognized a couple of their faces from the flying battleship his brother had hurled him out of. Everything was different, now, though. They were on opposite sides, he and SHIELD, as they had been during his first ever visit to Midgard. He understood their quarrel with Loki, but Jane being hurt turned the tables. They threatened her, they became the enemy. That, to Thor, was quite simple.

Almost as simple as taking them all out with a single toss of Mjölnir. Peacetime may have been a nice respite, and a chance to eat many excellent Midgardian delicacies... "Pizza," "french fries," and the most scrumptious of all, the "Burger King chocolate bacon sundae..."

But battle was Thor's time. When he could cave in a couple well-deserving skulls, _every_ day may as well have been Thorsday.

The jubilation of pummeling some SHIELD arse did not last long, however. Blinking through the clearing smoke and dust, Thor's eyes landed on the sight of his younger brother kneeling on the ground, cradling a half-conscious Jane Foster in his arms, looking fairly bloody, and paler than the time he'd found out he was pregnant, and...

No, it couldn't be.

Thor didn't know whether to chuckle or gape or break down himself:

Loki was weeping.

* * *

He had crashed an idiotic Midgardian van.

He had been shot in the kidney.

Jane was hurt. And still drunk.

SHIELD was after him.

His older brother had just picked up his mess.

And the most pathetic realization of all:

He just wanted to be back on the couch in that stupid lab, with Jane giving him ice and sandwiches, drinking Pepto-Bismol and watching "Titanic."

And now, after everything, after all the aid she had given him and all the precious moments he had spent studying her, looking upon her soft features and feeling the miraculous compassion in her touch... _He_ had hurt her. _He _had removed her from the relative safety of her lab for vanity's sake - so that he could have a damned _shower - _and he had been at fault for the car crash that had transformed her beautiful body to a bruised and bloodied heap. None of his own injuries, he realized now, could have possibly been the punishment for his actions on Midgard. Holding a broken Jane Foster in his arms was the punishment. The great tragic irony of the past few months: to fall from royalty to outcast, to be beaten senseless and made to conquer a world, to fail at that and fall even further, to suffer the worst physical illness and injury he'd ever known...

And then to practically kill the one soul who had dared to help him.

The wetness in his eyes, he realized numbly, had been tears. They were still falling.

He let them fall, unchecked.

* * *

Jane's head was buzzing infernally.

One minute she was being carried by Loki – who had been surprisingly _very_ strong and had smelled wonderfully of musky men's shampoo – and the next she was flying through a windshield.

She hadn't even felt herself hit the ground. Everything was so hazy; the desert heat pressed around her like too many blankets. Sharp pains had started to flicker in and out like a broken strobe. Her head, her ribs... Sometching wet was running down her face and she reached up with her hand, knowing it was going to be bloody when she pulled it back, and pulled it back anyway.

Okay, way more blood than she'd expected. Shit. _Shit_.

She tried to sit up and her left wrist screamed in pain, knifing and tingling. She could almost hear the tattered nerves scraping, an enormous speaker feeding back, a big harsh shriek. She cried out, gasping, panicking, ohgodohgodohgod don't look at it...

There was a bone poking straight out of the top of her wrist.

She screamed, coughed, screamed more, could barely hear herself over the ringing in her ears. Her eyes gaped as she sobbed. She couldn't get enough air, god it was like her lungs weren't working... Was she dying? Shit. Vans. Black vans.

Black vans on _fire_.

She tried to sit up again and realized someone's arms were around her.

And whoever it was smelled like sweat and... men's shampoo...

Her own heartbeat was going to break her eardrums. More wetness on her face. No, no, nonono, not more blood, please...

She touched the spot where she'd felt the moisture drop and looked at her fingertips: clear liquid. Water? Sweat?

Someone was crying but it wasn't her. She heard her own sobbing in her head and then someone else's, deeper, a totally weird, foreign sound...

She realized the liquid on her face might be someone else's tear. She cried even harder. She felt like she was going to throw up, oh god no, not like this-

The sobs were her name.

Whoever was crying was forming the sound of her name like it was some... mantra...

"Jane... Jane... Jane... Jane..."

* * *

Thor had decided to start crying himself for a few reasons: he felt sad and helpless, other people were crying, and it just made sense. It was nice to wallow in it for a bit.

He approached his brother and knelt in front of him, letting his tears flow, not wanting to look and see how badly Jane was hurt. There was so much pain here... Thor knew how to cause pain but not how to banish it. Mjölnir could do nothing medical.

He stared plaintively through his tears at Loki, who seemed to be crying more out of desperation than grief. It was the disparate weeping of a man at his wit's end. Poor Loki. Thor knew it had all been coming to this, knew his brother probably just needed a good cry and was too proud to admit it. Real men cried. Even rulers. Odin had taught that to them both, as children, and Thor had always seemed more open to the lesson than Loki had. And Valhalla, the things Loki had been through to deserve a nice long cry! Finding out he was adopted, making a multitude of wrong decisions, being tortured and then defeated, having his magic stripped...

His brother wouldn't have been crying if it weren't for Jane, Thor realized. The way Loki was holding her to his bosom, and saying her name as if that simple utterance could fix everything... Thor allowed himself to relish the fact that, for once, he'd been right about something: Jane had been special, different, a compassionate caregiver and a wonderful influence on Loki.

Thor almost laughed through his tears when he considered the fact that, despite his ornery nature and lack of overt sexuality, Loki had always had a woman in his life - even if that woman were Angrboda. The womanly presence had been partially due to Odin's judgment of Loki as a potentially wise husband, and partially due to many women's natural urge to help, and heal. Women just made things better; Loki was one of those things that, by fault of his own or otherwise, often needed to be made better. Sitting in the settling dirt of the desert, Thor could have mistaken Jane for another of Loki's brides... Sigyn, for instance. A woman - a confidant who understood Loki all the better because she wasn't part of some code he had to adhere to. Just another person who was there, who was present solely to listen to him. Thor had tried to serve that purpose for his brother, but it was easier said than done: Loki harbored resentment towards Asgard, because he compared himself to Thor, and because Loki had always known, at least subconsciously, that he himself just generally didn't fit in. He was dark and pale, preferred schooling to sport, was one of the only Asgardians who could use magic from a very young age. He had been a raven in a flock of eagles; bewitching in his own right, but never _belonging_. And there was no "male bonding" that could fix Loki's twisted self perception. Thor knew his brother had gifts to share, but those gifts would never emerge fully in Asgard. He needed something unique, something unexpected to pull him from himself.

And so, against all odds but not nonsensically, here Loki sat, weeping over a small mortal girl. It was almost magical.

Magical... Magical...

The word "magical" nagged a Thor's brain, but for the valkyrie's sake he could not remember why...

* * *

Loki's brain felt heavier than a sponge soaked in wet tar.

At some point over the course of the past few minutes of weeping, his mind had turned to introspection, to reason. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his thoughts, he knew he had to be in shock. After all, he wasn't _doing_ anything to cope with the situation at hand. He felt he could do nothing but sit in the dirt and say Jane's name and sniffle. There was a slice of him that found this all incredibly humiliating and degrading, a slice that urged him to think about how he was going to continue, escape. But that slice was small and buried under layers of pain and this new, unsettling "emotional" catharsis._  
_

And so he introspected, aimlessly, about the novelty of weeping and what it could possibly mean.

Crying was not a familiar sensation, at least not lately. He had cried with Odin when he had found out his true parentage, but those had been a boy's tears, a child's, born of hurt feelings and the very weakest, basest of sentiment. If he was going to be sentimental now – he may as well have admitted it: he _was_ being sentimental – he would be sentimental about much more powerful, important things. About... things bigger than himself. Things that threatened him. Things that pushed him to some brink of hopelessness. Hopelessness and...

And fear.

He had not felt true fear in so long. _So_ long. The threats of the Chitauri, the sickness and injury, SHIELD – those had been vexing, far from frightening. Even his punishment for Baldr – seeing his sons debased and submitting to his own torture – had provoked far more rage than it had fear. In all of those situations, _he_ had been predominantly in the right, and he had only been responsible for himself. Any action against him had been his problem, and there always seemed to have been a solution. So long as he was useful, the Chitauri would keep him alive; sickness was only temporarily debilitating, even with repressed magic; SHIELD was obsessed with their lovely game of cat and mouse, but they posed no true threat whatsoever.

But this was all different, entirely different, because here was Jane.

And Jane could die.

Could truly perish. Could be swept into the loosely knit fabric of oblivion and be lost to him forever.

Loki had lived a long, long while. He was someone who had begun to actually perceive, and understand, the longevity of forever. Forever, he knew, was a _damned_ long time.

Forever was not something Jane Foster possessed – but it was something she deserved.

Suddenly something snapped. Brittle and and jaggedly sharp and quick, Loki's brain swam with the ever-shortness of Jane's life. He could see her, see the minutes and hours and days shaved off by childhood bone breaks, by that stint of lung illness she'd had as a teenager, by the heart attack that would hit her in the far future...

By the volume blood she was currently losing from her wrist.

His mind stopped introspecting and gave him a good, painful jolt in the chest, a juggernaut of thought:

_Do something._

* * *

_He's crying_, Jane thought. He heart fluttered. _Loki is _crying.

She might have thought she was dreaming if she wasn't feeling her magic-induced stupor wearing off.

Her brain was beginning to put two and two together. She still felt the veil of shock, of sickening pain from her broken wrist, but she felt quicker, less drunk. She looked back on what had just happened. She had been in the van, Loki had taken a shower... Had Loki been _driving_ the van?

Yep, she acknowledged, Loki had been _driving_ the van. Which explained why it had crashed... But the other vans, the black ones...

Oh shit, those were _SHIELD_ vans. It was all making sense now. Why they had to leave the gym, the news, the... had that really been gunfire?

"Did they harm either of you, brother?" Thor's voice. He sounded stuffy, as though he were crying too. She looked up at him. Sure enough, tears. Was anyone dry eyed? Figuring out what to do? She felt herself dip into the shallows of panic again.

"Jane was injured in the crash," she heard Loki say. His voice was tight and broken, his words hissing by through clenched teeth. "Her wrist seems... to be the worst and I... have a bull-_sssssaagh_..." he took a couple deep puffs of breath before continuing, "a bullet in my lower back that seems to have hit... something dreadful."_  
_

Okay. Yes. Panic time.

But no- _no!_ These were _gods_, they had _powers_, this was asinine! They needed to–

* * *

"Stop talking," screeched Jane, "and _fucking do something!"_

Loki looked down at her, shocked. She had echoed his thoughts almost exactly. She was biting her lip and panting, clearly in pain, but her eyes burned more viciously than a bomb.

Loki's mind slurred, his temples throbbed, his back screamed. His body cajoled, begged him to please, _please_ not undertake any more physical exertion... but dammit, he would listen to it later.

Magic... Magic.

He glared at the break in Jane's wrist. His brain probed the air around him. Everything was dry as a bone, as the carcass of some beast left to die in the faded, cracked dirt. His splintered skull was toying with levels of pain, addling his thoughts as if to say, "You _cannot_ be serious about trying this." _There– _the most minuscule thread, the tiniest oasis of energy. He ground his molars together and _wrenched_ it out of the atmosphere, feeling something in his head split with a nauseating ripping sensation even as he watched the bone retreat into the skin of Jane's arm. He would not be able to heal it completely, but it–

The ground tilted in an earth-shattering spell of vertigo. The entire desert turned a ghostly bloodcurdling greenish-white. Giant blobs of aches pounded and pummeled and tore at his every nerve ending, a freakish flaming circus of agony. His lower back throttled his brain – a warning, a deterrent. His body was drawing the line in the sand. To cross it would be to risk unconsciousness – or worse, judging by the color and size of the spots in front of his eyes. For Jane, so be it. Of all the decisions he thought would never be simple, the choice to sacrifice his own existence was suddenly clear as day. He sucked air through his teeth and was preparing for another bout of organic magical torture when–

"Brother!" he dimly heard Thor yell. "What are you doing?"

"Whatever I can," he replied faintly. "Unless you miraculously have another way for me to use magic. Which I doubt you..."

He stopped speaking. A tidal wave of realization had just washed over Thor's big, hairy face.

"No," Loki said. "No... you..."

Thor gulped, let out the universe's most mirthless yuk, and sheepishly drew a vial out of his pocket. Loki glimpsed a gold ribbon hanging from the neck of the container, threaded through a small piece of parchment... Upon which was scrawled:

_"Use it _well, _my son. ~Odin All-Father."_

Loki felt hot blood boil up and sizzle behind his eardrums. He could think of but one thing to say in this instance – and it happened to be a quaint Midgardian curse.

"You have got," he snarled, lips pulled back over dry teeth, "to be _fucking_ with me."

Thor blushed from his neck to his blonde mane.

"I knew I'd forgotten something," he muttered. "My mistake. But this should help." He glanced up at the sky and said, abashedly, "I've found him, Father."

A low rumble from beneath the dusty ground. The stopper of the vial popped back with unbelievable force. A staggering, rippling jet of lightning plummeted from the sky, ricocheted off the glass container and hit Loki smack in the face. He coughed, smoothed back his singed and smoking hair, and found that he was not as angry with Thor as he had been moments ago.

Most likely because he was too busy feeling pure, exhilarating, invigorating, dazzling _power_ flooding every vein and artery and muscle and bone and nerve and speck of skin and hair and nail in a vigorous orgasm of vitality.

He grinned. Widely. Madly.

Mischievously.

His magic was back.

* * *

**Wooo! Review with questions, comments, theories, I love it all!**

**The stage is set for more action! What will Loki do now that his magic is restored? Will he be allowed back to Asgard? Is SHIELD out of the picture? And what will all this mean for Jane?**

**Thanks, everyone!**


	22. Chapter 21

**What a long, strange night it's been.**

**My boyfriend is out of town for his fancy real-person marketing internship, so I have not made contact with many humans whatsoever. I have started to pretend that the guy who works at 711 and the Avengers (plus Loki... _especially_ Loki) are my real boyfriends and _no one will convince me otherwise_.**

**I had to stop writing at least four times because (a) I kept typing "Stuttgart" as "Stuttfart" and (b) I kept breaking out in a crazy Tina Fey-esque dance to my own progressive French house music, and Billy Talent's new single "Viking Death March," and My Chemical Romance's "Mama." God bless the Denon AH D2000s and HeadRoom portable amp.**

**Did I mention I had some Vitali Citron and Diet Coke before/while writing this chapter? Actually rather a lot of Vitali Citron and Diet Coke. #drinkofchoice. #extraclassy. ****Wooo summer Sunday nights! **

**(Don't do drugs, kids).**

**_Ink_, because I still cannot message you... You kill me. Your reviews kill me. Endless love. I can't even.**

**And everyone else! Endless love to all of you as well! All reviewers, gold stars for your theories and reactions and awesomeness.**

**Enjoy! This is for all of you.**

**PS - this chapter is "sex-you-all" [sexual. yep.]. If you haven't had an orgasm by the time you're finished reading it, ya get yer money back... your free money... but still. So much Lokane, so much Loki and Thor badassery... **

**I kid you not.**

* * *

"Jane, are you hearing me?"

She nodded. She was a little confused. Her wrist was a splintering, hot ball of messed up nerves that sent shrieking pings of pain all the way up through her jaw, but other than that she felt relatively fine. She hadn't gone to sleep, had she? She wasn't totally in shock, was she? There was no grave injury that might prevent her from hearing someone, was there?

Was there?

"Am I, like, really bad?" she asked shakily. She sounded hoarse to her own ears. Heat compressed her vocal chords. If she could just get some water, maybe...

"I'm sorry," said Loki, "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean am I really badly… injured? Like to the point where I wouldn't be able to hear you?"

"Oh," said Loki. "No… No... Your wrist is still broken and you're very badly bruised everywhere else. I am going to do my best to get you on the up-and-up, so if you could–"

"Your ears are still bleeding" Jane interrupted. "And your nose."

"They will have to wait. I am immortal, in case you haven't noticed. And now that my magic has returned I'm not going to expel unnecessary energy fixing things that can fix themselves. You are my main concern."

So the lightning... had been _magic_. Jane forced herself to focus on Loki and she could _see _it: the traces of color where grays and greens and dark shadows had been, the rekindled spark in his eyes, the keen alertness of all the little muscles in his face that had once been crimped with pain. He looked... younger. Or fresher, somehow. As though he'd been... cleansed, or – all religious connotation aside – _baptized_.

"Yeahokay," she said quickly, the quickness coming from pain and also from a willingness to trust Loki that curiously had _nothing_ to do with magic spells. "WhatdoIneedtodo?"

"Lie still," he said. He raised his eyebrows suddenly. Even he himself looked surprised at the shortness of the command, as though he had expected it to sound more grandiose. "And please," he tacked on, his eyebrows knit together, "try to remain calm. Nothing will hurt, but it might feel strange, perhaps uncomfortable."

"It feels _very_ uncomfortable," said Thor. Loki shot him an icy look and he shrugged. "Not," Thor continued, "that I have not been grateful to have been healed magically in the past, it just... feels funny."

"Yes, thank you for your _expertise_, Thor, that will come in handy," Loki glowered. He bent over Jane, his face set in concentration, and his eyes... Jane had a hard time placing exactly what his eyes were doing. They seemed to turn a shade paler, or perhaps become more reflective, more metallic, as if they were filling with all the light glinting off the burning vans.

And then Jane felt, for the first time in her life, the feeling of being healed not by drugs or casts or Band-Aids – but by magic.

It was, as Thor had suggested, a little discombobulating. It felt frenetic and off-kilter, this quickness of healing, as though she had just drunk a hundred cups of coffee. Every nerve and muscle and bone was hypersensitive, on edge, tipsy with being forced back into place so soon. She felt... not dizzy, but some new, strange form of vertigo that made everything rush _at_ her. It was a sensation of moving forward very quickly, shot into the sky, blazing through that first flashing, beeping tunnel of Space Mountain.

And all of a sudden... a _cleanness._ The feeling of having just emerged from the best session of yoga _ever_: a little sore but _invigorated_, awake and calm all at the same time. She breathed and could feel each of the alveoli in her lungs flexing, each muscle in her throat contracting and her ribs expanding. She could feel the oxygen flowing through her bloodstream with each heartbeat and pumping towards her brain and her bones and the tips of her fingers. A thought passed vaguely, simultaneously sharply and vaguely, through her pleasantly buzzing head: if Loki's magic could be put into pills or syringes or plants and sold, everyone with access to it would be an instant addict. This was DMT on LSD, a weed brownie on ecstasy...

She felt her eyes close, yielding to the wondrous strangeness, the total through-the-rabbit-hole feeling of it all. A grin melted slowly, endlessly across her face.

"She seems to be enjoying it," she heard Thor's voice say. His low, gruff speech was _right_ in her ear, was miles and miles away, was _right_ in her ear...

"She'll have some bruising, but I must say I've outdone myself." Loki, that time. She could hear the fatigue in his voice, buried under layers and layers of gravelly, husky warmth, lowness and smoothness and confidence. Her ears felt like little satellites, tapping into his baritone timbre. She felt like thick curtains had been lifted from her eardrums and she was hearing him speak for the first time and it was...

It was gorgeous.

She had to do something about it.

She took in another breath, and squinted her eyes and let a whole galaxy of stars and little blips of the most beautiful fireworks and grand, rounded planets rush by her as she sighed out, in one magnanimous, glorious, climactic exhale:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh."

* * *

Loki did not blush often. It was physiological evidence of sentiment and embarrassment. Sentiment was a hurdle over which he had already leapt, an acknowledgment he'd already made – yes, Jane had made him sentimental, certainly, fine, jolly good, etc. etc.

Blushing, at this point, would have to derive from true embarrassment alone. Or lust. Valhalla forbid, lust. What _was_ lust, anymore? His stay with the Chitauri had all but scrubbed out his loins with a clod of Midgardian steel wool. If anyone or anything could have made him feel lustful during his sojourn on Midgard, it would have _perhaps_ been the little fireball Agent Romanov... But any stirrings for her feminine... flesh had been abruptly cut off by the fact that she had bested him, albeit briefly, and he would not stand for that. _No_ part of him would stand for that – yes, double entendre intended.

But this sigh of Jane's... oh damn it all, but...

It had forced a tingling heat to flow up from his collarbone to his hairline.

"Brother," said Thor, at almost a whisper, his eyes squinting against a bout of laughter, "that almost sounded like–"

"I am aware," hissed Loki, willing the blood to drain out of his face, "of what it _sounded_ like. I'm the one who's been wedded twice, if you recall."

"Lucky wives, then," said Thor, his voice strained to the breaking point with dammed-in giggles, "lucky wives indeed."

Loki gnashed his teeth and chose not to respond.

Instead he assessed his ability to cope with the situation beyond Jane, who seemed... relatively stable. There were at least thirty SHIELD agents stirring in the dirt surrounding himself and Jane and Thor. They looked weakened, but certainly not incapable of firing the automatic weapons they still held...

He shoved himself up on one knee, still cupping a grinning Jane to his bruised chest, and whipped his head around, looking for nearby cover of some sort.

A burning SHIELD van. Close enough. The actual burning, however, would have to cease.

He whisked out a hand and prepared himself to use a bit of magic he hadn't felt comfortable controlling or implementing for awhile:

Jötun frost.

Loki let the gnawing frigidness of blue ice snake up from the tips of his toes to the tips of his fingers and shoot outward with a nippy, crackling _zing_, simultaneously fluid and rigid, almost purifying in its chilling, gelid spiral. A synapse fired off in his battered brain as jets of snapping verglas streaked from his outstretched hand: this is natural, this is right... this is _home_.

He made a mental note to use Jötun frost more often. The SHIELD van was not only effectively cooled, but much more aesthetically pleasing with intricate blue icicles adorning its awkward chrome detailing.

Loki launched himself onto both his feet with newfound strength – he was using his magic to kill pain in the interim, and it was _luscious_ – and laid Jane out gently on her back behind the van.

He glanced down at her; her dark hair was spread out behind her head, her small form splayed just so, a glowing expression painted on her delicate features...

The flat dirt did seem uncomfortable, though. Loki dipped into an ostensibly never-ending pool of plush, ambrosial magic and conjured a gargantuan goose down pillow underneath Jane's entire body.

Better.

* * *

Thor smiled and smiled and smiled.

What a lovely gesture on his brother's part, to lay Jane down in the shelter of a frozen-over SHIELD van. And with a pillow, no less! Truly, this was a new leaf Loki had turned over. He'd seen the god of mischief conduct feats of bravery, even relative courtesy...

But _chivalry?_ What a novel behavior– what a _fantastic_ and splendorous behavior! He could not wait to tell the All-Father._  
_

The magical healing, too, had gone over much better than Thor had expected. Loki had seemed to emit some sort of extra care, some tenderness that had not been lost on the god of thunder. How generous of Loki to make the experience more bearable for Jane, more... enjoyable...?

Suddenly, though, Thor felt something break as he watched his little brother construct a giant magical pillow for Jane behind the SHIELD van. It was action _so_ generous... so... _tender... _that Thor felt, in a way, upstaged... As though Loki was more interested in Jane than he had originally assumed...

But no matter. Jane was safe now. That was the truly important thing. And there was no one who cared more for Jane's safety than Thor himself...

Right.

Right...?

Loki was walking out from behind the SHIELD van now... No, he wasn't merely walking... He was _strutting_, one leg overlapping the other, hips slightly jaunty, shoulders rotating, almost back to his old self, the mischief-maker, the Trickster.

"There is a Midgardian shanty," Loki said, tilting his head towards the rousing SHIELD agents, "a song that I've heard on the 'radio' several times during my stay at Jane's lab. It is a ditty about prowess," he said, striding ever closer, "and mastery. One particular line perfectly evokes a sentiment that I wish to convey in our current circumstances."

He stopped directly in front of Thor. He cocked an eyebrow, grinning, and flicked his hand out to gesture at Mjölnir:

"'Stop,'" Loki said, lowly and clearly, eyes blazing, milking the line out to its full potential:

"'Hammer time.'"

* * *

"Allow me to clarify something," said Loki as he fired off blasts of frost at the stumbling SHIELD agents. "We are going to forget my teary breakdown from earlier, are we not?"

"Whatever you say, brother," said Thor, catching his hammer in his hand with a whirling metallic _thwang_. "Whatever you say."

Loki sighed... (So much sighing lately. He was almost driven to sighing _about_ sighing.) He was beginning to feel the gnashing hems of fatigue claw at his physique. But he would never let Thor know it. Physical weakness was a secret kept between his brain and his body...

And perhaps Jane Foster.

Perhaps.

The image of her, Jane, splayed out on the goose down pillow behind the frosted-over SHIELD van, was enough to keep Loki pulsing ice from his fingertips. She was so incredibly _worth_ defending, with her dark eyes and her tiny fingers and the way her pink pucker tensed when she saw him in pain–

Pain.

Oh dammit, _pain:_

Another bullet, this one in his left shoulder. Hothothot stabs, searing spasms from shattered nerves and bones and Hel knew what else. What a mess he was becoming for this girl. _Had _become for this girl. And for whatever reason, he was submitting to it. Submitting to the necessity of fighting enemies, fighting pain, fighting tears, fighting indignity. It was a primal urge, the fight, the bite of frost from under his fingernails, the subversion of legions of agony, like a single soldier fighting off an entire squadron of opponents.

Magic made all the difference. _All_ the difference. There was control here, in this phase of Magical Pain Suspension, heightened senses, whip-quick reflexes...

And ah, ahh, _ohhhh_ it was almost _lustful_, the crackling of SHIELD joints as they submitted to the ice, to the blow of Thor's hammer, to the incredible power they could never match and yet somehow fought against so vehemently, so boldly, so stubbornly.

This was the thrill of Stuttgart again. The bending of knees, the submission; the startling and fulfilling image of himself, adorned with his golden-horned helmet, three times multiplied, hovering over scores of mortals... Guiding, hustling, _sculpting_ human minds.

But this wasn't Stuttgart; this was far _better_ than Stuttgart. Because this was _righteous_ power, earned for a righteous cause, a righteous woman. The SHIELD agents were bowing, their bodies breaking as recompense for the lady they had wronged. He and his brother – yes... _yes_, he finally admitted in a massive, cathartic purgation, his _brother_ – fighting together, as one, as a joined force of unspeakable power, of unutterable domination.

Asgard. Jötunheim. Midgard. Meeting, clashing, sparring, brawling.

All for Jane Foster.

As it should be, Loki thought.

As it should be.

* * *

Thor lashed out, again and again, feeling Mjölnir leave and return and leave and return, black-garbed SHIELD agents crumpling before his eyes. He still felt the shallow sadness of recognition, those faces... those faces from the helicarrier that would haunt him in his sleep the next few nights...

But for Jane, he thought, it just had to be done. She was tangled up in all of this and he was responsible for getting her out of it.

He chanced a glance at his brother. Despite the blood running in crazed, jagged paths from his ears and nose, the younger god was grinning with impossible madness, a gleeful roguishness, jubilant mania. The insatiable gaiety of a clever berserker.

As it should be, Thor thought with a smile, as it should be.

"That shanty," he yelled across to Loki, whipping out Mjölinir once more for good measure, "it was, in fact, extremely relevant. It _is_ 'the time for the hammer.'"

"'Hammer time!'" shouted Loki over the snapping sound of the jagged ice bursting from his digits.

"Right!" bellowed Thor. "What you said."

"Because the song," cried Loki over the booms and blasts of ice and metal, "is written and performed by this fellow by the name of 'MC Hammer!'"

"Aahhh," blasted Thor. "I see!"

He clocked a fat, blubbery SHIELD agent in the face with a jolt of Mjölnir.

Damn, but it felt good.

* * *

Jane was incredibly, insatiably happy.

What could possibly be better than reclining on what felt like a gigantic Tempur-Pedic body pillow in a tripping-balls state of magical cloud-nine while spectating two foxy demigods whipping the asses of the organization that had kept her shackled beneath the earth for months?

It was like watching the WWE.

Except, if the WWE had magical powers.

And giant thunderous hammers.

And rippling muscles.

And long, dark hair. And frosty, milk-white skin, and splendiferous green eyes that clenched up with the effort of sending resplendent, majestic flashes of icicles from the tips of nimble, electric-blue fingers.

But Jane was getting ahead of herself. It had to be the magic.

Magic that had been spawned from those ivory hands – those charitable, healing, _adept_ hands.

In the midst of her magical high, Jane let her brain spin out and wonder exactly what those hands could do to her...

Woahwoahwoah.

_Woah. _

This was Loki she was thinking about. Loki the New-York-City-demolishing, terrorizing, threatening, psychotic, rude, crude–

No... _No_, she reminded herself. Visualizations, remembrances: the plaintive look in his eye as he'd sat on the floor of the kitchen, back against the dishwasher, queasy in spite of himself, begging silently for the Pepto-Bismol... The shape his lips had made as he'd bent over and kissed a stupefied Cecile on the back of her hand... The glimmer on his irises as he'd held her, _healed_ her, his brow furrowed, his mind sculpting medical spells into perfect form...

Jane languished on the pillow, chest thrumming, mind wobbly, and allowed herself to admit it:

She _wanted _him.

* * *

_Ah, hello pain_, Loki thought. He was in the arms of the gentlest of deliriums, the most benignly torturous mistress.

Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Loki knew it kept his world spinning.

The thought was a pleasant déjà-vu, a return to stasis, a channeling of a once-former glory. Chitaurian indoctrination. Freakish mettle. Singular nerve.

Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain: a lead-pumped kidney and shoulder, bruised abdominal organs, split-open skull, bloodied brain, hitching ribs.

He was not nearly masochistic enough to _appreciate_ the pain – even after what the Chitauri had gone through trying to make it so...

But he was aware enough to let the anguish take him and remold him, re_make_ him, undo and redo the synapses in the deep recesses of his mind.

All while taking out SHIELD agents, reminding his brother of the relevance of Midgardian song lyrics, and keeping tabs on Jane.

Loki had been right in his earlier utterance. Standing in the settling dust of a hot-blooded confrontation with puny, expendable mortals, while Jane lounged safely on the pillow he'd made for her, he knew it to be true: he had outdone himself.

MC Hammer had been explicitly correct:

No one could touch this.

* * *

**K, have you had an orgasm yet?**

**...**

**That's what I thought.**

**Yup.**

**You can decide whether I'm kidding or not.**

**Coming up soon: more stuff relevant to, ya know, the actual plot.**

**But wasn't this fun?**

**;)**


	23. Chapter 22

**Sooo... hi! Hi everyone!**

**I just wanted to start by saying such a sincere thanks to all the reviewers and followers who've stuck by this story. I'm so so sorry for the prolonged absence, and I SWEAR updates will be coming in super quick over the next few days. **

**This chapter will be some post-battle wind down, with new mystery coming up at the end! Yeah!**

**For those of you hanging on for a kiss, PATIENCE! Haha. But seriously, if you stick around you'll get your wish soon enough...**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Loki hadn't felt this satisfied since he'd sunken that blinking device into the eyeball of that old mortal fool in Stuttgart. The desert sands were dotted with the heavy black dust of SHIELD corpses, some battered by blows from Mjölnir and some enrobed in diamond-sharp ice. It was a graveyard of misfit toy soldiers, silly Midgardian windup dolls. Still impressive.

_Carnage, destruction,_ _desolation_... All of those terms were secondary, little peripheral descriptors for a bigger, more important label: _victory_.

Gratification had never been this... gratifying. The joining of forces, the full extension of magic like rust melting from mechanical gears, the damsel in distress; it was all storybook redemption. Practically cliché but almost more fulfilling for it. All the days spent in unconventional agony and unusual humiliation were over. It was his time now, his story, his fate.

And here he was waxing sentimental again. Jane would be proud.

Pragmatism brought Loki back to the physical: wounds needed additional healing. Right. Loki hung his head back and worked his jaw, letting magic weave and wend its way through his veins. The accustomed tingling, the keening quiver of tissues made new, made _better. _Usually, each flutter and swell of magic left a buzzing fingerprint in the flesh it healed, a signature, like a seal of approval. A confirmation of a job well done. It was his body's way of telling him that everything was ship shape, primed for maximum efficiency.

This time around, Loki stopped healing himself before he could feel it.

Perhaps it was superstition bred from his newfound sentiment – a sense that he could not heal himself completely until he was out of danger. _Don't waste time repairing things that will be broken anew._ Perhaps it was the long-lost notion of compassion: _save some of it for Jane. _But no– he had plenty of magic to go around; now that it had been fully restored it was practically inexhaustible. Given the time, he could repair himself and others as repeatedly as he saw fit.

The Chitauri, then. The training. He and pain were so inseparable that he could never allow his body to make a full recovery. A silly notion, indicative, probably, of a psychological hangup that needed fixing...

But no, that wasn't it either. Matter of fact, he would have relished being without pain for once – for both the novelty of it as well as the genuine relief. Why, then...

He felt a touch on his forearm. He looked down and there was Jane Foster, dark and doe-like and sand-covered, wearing a little frown of concern.

"Are you okay?" she asked. She wasn't asking Thor. She was asking _him._ "I can help you walk over to that pillow if you're in pain."

Loki felt himself swallow, nod, give a little bit more of his weight to her so that she could walk him over. The lamb leading the lion. Valhalla knew he didn't need the help, but he could practically hear the gears turning in his head, the anesthetizing and benumbing acceptance that pain was his link to this woman. If he was not vulnerable in her eyes, there was every possibility that she would only see monster she'd met in SHIELD containment. This was the norm, the _easy_ status quo of Jane's unconditional aid.

And the pain was completely worth it.

* * *

"Don't look at them if you can help it," said Loki as they were walking over to the pillow. Jane, not quite understanding what he meant, looked up and about and gasped. Bodies were scattered like chunks of debris, bruised, frozen, fallen. She was thankful they were wearing black suits and uniforms, otherwise the blood...

Jane wrenched her head to the side and retched without warning. She blinked tears of exertion from her eyes and was stunned to realize she hadn't actually vomited.

"I believe I was justified when I said _don't_ look at them," Loki said. There was a tiny glimmer of mirth in his voice that made Jane want to slap him across the face.

"They're _dead_?" she asked, the words feeling strange in her mouth.

"They made it quite clear what they intended to do to us, so yes," said Loki. "As doornails. And please try not to go on about your inflamed morals. I'm guessing you wouldn't prefer to take their place. You'll have to start thinking that way if you want to evade a lethal government agency."

Jane fumed a bit. He was so... so frustratingly _right_. It wasn't that she was seeing dead bodies for the first time – she was, but she could think about that later – it was that she knew she wouldn't rather be dead herself. The agents hadn't died doing anything heroic. They had been following orders. But she, Jane, was doing something important, something groundbreaking, something...

Oh God, what was she _doing_? Suddenly a nagging sense of lost control. Jane visualized her objective, if she'd ever even had one, as a ball of string unraveling and rolling swiftly away from her. Strangely enough, she didn't mind it. This, she realized, was what she had felt when she'd followed Thor to the SHIELD encampment ages ago. This was _adventure_.

"How are you feeling?" Loki asked once they were seated on the pillow. Jane felt herself sink slowly into the down, being careful not to let herself drift completely into him. She still held her breath around him, letting him tower over her. He looked worn but _whole_; his presence was somehow more solid, more real than when he'd been heaped on her couch. Magic, she guessed, had filled in crags and erased shadows that Tylenol just couldn't.

"Good," she responded honestly, letting a tight smile play at her lips. "I feel really good."

Jane had never thought of magic as a feeling, a sensation. It had always been a visible illusion. The rabbit in the hat. The lady sawed in half and miraculously repaired. Magic was seen, from the outside, by an observer who knew it was really all a ruse. The suspension of disbelief in a magic show was always paper-thin, reliant on an unlikely combination of denial and faith given willingly by audience members.

Loki's magic, by contrast, was beautifully utilitarian: it just _did_ what it had to do. And it did it in a way in a way that was felt rather than seen. Loki hadn't simply performed a trick for her. He had imbued her with magic, _given_ her a piece of it. Jane was a magician's assistant who had caught a glance behind the curtain after a show and seen the real thing. It was unnerving and tingly. It was a precious secret. It was...

"Likely the after-effects of magical healing," said Loki. "It can cause euphoria in those first experiencing it. A purely physical reaction. It will wear off in a few hours."

Jane's heart sunk a little. Her lungs crimped in spite of the happiness she'd been feeling, or... thought she felt. She wanted to cry for being so stupid, for thinking she'd been any different than Cecile or the gym rats who'd been knocked out by Loki's magical "affections..."

She lifted her eyes and looked at him, practically starting when she realized he'd been staring at her.

Loki was smiling. Just a bit: the half lip-curl, a subtle narrowing of his eyes, a tiny crease between his brows.

"You seemed particularly susceptible to the, erm," he said, the smile twisting its way up his jawline, "first-time sensations. If I may be so bold-"

"You've been pretty bold so far anyway," cut in Jane.

"Yes, _touché_. Still– If I may be so bold... I must say I have not induced a sound like that from a woman in hundreds of years."

Jane felt heat swarm her entire face up through her scalp.

"But you have 'induced' it before," she said, teasing him, fighting to keep her voice from breaking.

"We would need more Merlot for that story, would we not?" said Loki.

Jane must have been making a comically disappointed face, because the demigod actually laughed at her – a short, sandpaper-dry chuckle.

"Let us leave it at this:" he said, leaning in the slightest bit closer, "when I say I am magical, I'm do not always mean... literally. Oh– hello, Thor."

Jane whipped her head up and saw the god of thunder staring down at them, looking as though he'd discovered Santa didn't exist.

* * *

Thor was thoroughly shocked. Did his ears deceive him?

Could it be true?

Had Jane Foster and his brother truly drunk the finest of Midgardian wines – the sumptuous and ambrosial _Merlot_ - without him?

He vocalized his concern: "The both of you... You supped on my _favorite beverage_ while I was away?"

His brother and Jane spoke simultaneously:

"I thought coffee was your favorite," stuttered Jane.

"You _would_ be partial to that rot," scoffed Loki.

"_Answer me!"_ bellowed Thor, to the apparent shock of the two conspirators.

Loki twiddled his thumbs, not returning Jane's glare. She sighed, acknowledging that she would have to respond.

"Um..." she said. "Look– it was for Loki's... head. Because it was hurting him. And wine is really... good for that..."

Jane threw up her hands.

"Oh, god, Thor, I'm really sorry but the truth is we just wanted to get drunk! There. I'm sorry... I'm sorry your feelings are hurt. Do you wanna talk about it?"

"It is just..." said Thor, practically feeling tears prick his eyes, "that Merlot is so tasty. And I was not there to consume it."

"That's... that's it?" asked Jane. Thor was confused. Of course that was it... That was _all_ of it. The Merlot was just one example of the Midgardian delicacies his brother had been enjoying whilst he'd been away getting in arguments with Odin on Loki's behalf. Merlot... sandwiches... It was simply unfair. So unfair that he thought he'd say it aloud:

"It isn't fair."

Loki and Jane looked at one another. Jane shrugged.

"And the both of you," said Thor, "are not being fair, either. We were fighting together, like _brothers_ again, and now you're _shrugging_ at one another like... little lasses with little... _secrets!_"

"Thor, please!" said Jane. She looked at Loki again and then back at the older god. Small tears sparkled in her eyes. "There's no reason to get all sensitive about it. Nothing happened while you were gone, alright? Nothing important. I just did my best to heal Loki while he practiced a little magic, and he had like _one_ sandwich. And that was _it_. _Nothing_ else happened_. _Okay?"_  
_

Thor looked at the ground.

"O_kay_?" Jane asked.

Thor nodded, sighed, unclenched the fists he'd made. There were more important things to worry about now, safety measures the needed to be taken, messages to be delivered. He turned his attention to Loki.

"How are you faring now, brother?" he asked.

Loki lifted his eyes upward without moving his head. "I am well," he said. And then, in a small voice: "Thank you."

But Thor knew Loki was lying. There was a shadowy dolefulness behind his eyes, a look he'd seen Loki wear often as a child when Odin would pick Thor to travel to the Bifrost with him alone.

The three of them sat in silence for a few moments. Every so often one of them would lift their eyes to one another: Thor to Loki, then to Jane, Loki to Jane, Jane back to Loki and then quickly to Thor. Thor felt so much affection for the two – his brother and his... was she his love? His former love? He was so very confused. He pushed the thought out of his brain and sighed.

"What..." said Jane, "what happens now? I don't wanna step on anyone's toes here, but I don't think going back to the lab is a good idea."

Loki stood up. "She's correct, the lab would be foolish. For whatever reason, Jane has decided she wants to wrangle with forces that are beyond her; as such, she needs _Asgardian_ protection. You and I both know that..." Loki winced before he finished the thought: "...brother."

"Hello," said Jane, rising indignantly from the pillow herself. "I'm not a kid, you don't have to talk about me like I'm not here."

"The two of us _are_ Asgardian protection," said Thor.

"Don't play dumb, Thor," said Loki. "Asgardian protection means _Asgard._ With my replenished magic I could have us there in moments."

Thor looked at his hands, then to Jane, who was glaring crossly up at them, tiny and breathtakingly beautiful even in her anger. This would be so difficult to tell her, to tell Loki... but it had to be said.

"Transportation," said Thor, gazing out at nothing in particular, "is unfortunately not the issue."

"_What, _then?" Loki snarled. "What is it? Is Odin _still_ displeased with me, after letting me wallow in the humiliation of mortal illness? Is he not finished thinking of creative ways to punish me, by keeping me and the woman whose safety I've endangered stranded in a realm that seems to only want to chew me up and spit me out?"

Thor could not look at his brother, even as Loki shoved his face inches from Thor's.

"_What?_" Loki barked. Thor heard Jane sniffle. He looked up and met Loki's hard, green eyes.

"I swear to you," said Loki, his voice low and cracked and tired, "that in spite of every kindness Asgard has ever shown me, I will find a way to burn it to ash if they use me to threaten her."

"Then you _must_ listen to me, brother," said Thor, "and listen well."

Thor paused to let the déjà-vu wash over him. He half expected Tony Stark to swoop in and throttle him to the ground... but nothing. Loki was still in front of him, his face worn, his expression for once lacking all irony.

"Odin's wish," Thor continued, "is that we fix what we have done here before we return home. The bodies that lie about us now will be the first of many if we abandon Midgard."

Loki interrupted, his voice sharpened by a new, strange nervousness, "Thor-"

"No, I will finish speaking, Loki," said Thor. "Midgard's possession of the Tessaract, its... 'nuclear weapons...' I was not lying back on SHIELD's flying battleship when I spoke if Midgard's readiness for a higher form of war. Midgard is becoming a realm that needs not protection, but control. Discipline. Yes, myself and Stark and Banner and all the rest protected it from the Chitauri... from you. But Midgard will pick bones with other realms if it is left alone - perhaps still more dangerous realms at that. We cannot leave for Asgard so abruptly, and with human bodies in our wake. You _must_ see reason in that. You who would have ruled these people yourself!"

Thor looked to his brother to gauge a reaction. He expected annoyance, anger, perhaps even sadness.

What he had not expected to see written on Loki's face... was fear.

Loki blinked, shot a twitching flicker of a glance at Jane, and took Thor's forearm. The younger god led the older one several paces away, leaned in close to Thor's ear. He hesitated and then spoke through dry lips, practically whispering:

"It's followed me here."

Thor felt the air rush from his body. His words tumbled out in a spiral of dread, "What are you–"

"You know what I speak of, Thor," rasped Loki. "I had thought... since Baldr... that it had left me. That letting go on the Bifrost could have... That the Chitauri may have beaten it from me. But it dogs me still."

"Jane..." Thor started.

Loki's voice dropped to the tiniest shred of a whisper. "Jane knows naught of it," he said. "I can protect her only so long as it lies dormant and then..."

"I'm still _right_ over here!" shouted Jane.

"We will speak of it later, when we are out of immediate danger," whispered Thor to Loki. "You have a responsibility to Jane, to tell her about it. Do you understand?"

Suddenly Thor was the older brother again, responsible for cheering Loki up when he was down, for showing him right from wrong - for telling him what needed to be done so that everyone could be happy. It was a role he had not tried to fill for eons. Being present in that way for Loki now, in spite of the circumstances... There was a sort of strangely beautiful completeness to it.

Loki looked into his brother, eyes still frightened, jaw tensed in acknowledgment.

"I understand," he said.

* * *

**Hmm, so what's with this new mystery surrounding Loki? What will he tell Jane? Is it all connected to the Sigyn conundrum?**

**Well, of course it is, because I don't write things on accident. ;)**

**More will be revealed! Next chap's gonna be juicy, I promise!**

**Thanks, everyone!**


	24. Chapter 23

**Bahh, I remain ever-lame!**

**Fourth of July week / weekend turned out to be crazier than I thought...**

**But as a reward, here is THE LONGEST, JUICIEST, SEXIEST CHAPTER YET.**

**I'm not kidding.**

**I'm not kidding _so_ much, that I'm officially posting a WARNING at the top of this chap for ADULT-NESS. (Nothing too graphic, but definitely T stuff).**

**My reviewers and followers and genii and angels.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

They checked into a border motel in Columbus, New Mexico around midnight. The smell of the desert, rusty and heavy, floated up through the cool night air. Jane leaned against the bashed-in van in the motel parking lot and let the familiar scent calm her. The inn had been a speck on an otherwise spotless horizon, floating up out of the dunes and tumbleweeds in all of its whitewashed, ramshackle glory. A tiny strip of a building, eight rooms all in a row. Doors opening to the parking lot, grafted into the wall like teeth.

Jane leaned her head back and closed her eyes and tried not to think about Loki making reservations at the check-in desk. Was he magicking the night receptionist into submission? It didn't bear wondering about; Loki had things under control. Mostly. His health still worried her. Back on the road, he'd winced whenever the van had hit a larger bump – and Jane could've sworn she'd felt a physical reaction of her own, the synapse-firing equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. _"The after effects of magical healing."_ Protective instinct. A fading magical link between the two of them.

Jane reached up and rubbed some of the fatigue out of her eyes. The excitement of the day had finally surrendered to the threat of exhaustion. Thoughts still spun through her brain, a cascade of _is SHIELD still looking for us, what were those two talking about, if I walk away from all of this now could I just have my lab and my life back?_ All her musings, drawn out by long evening shadows and the settling dust of the day's chaos, were full sentences. In fact, she hadn't been able to think like this for a while – to really _ponder_. The shaken up state of her life was bringing her new clarity, new ideas. As obtuse as it sounded, she'd forgotten about how powerful and meaningful thinking could be. Science had taught her that. Science had taught her many of her most valuable lessons and skills.

Now there was something new in her life, something much more thought-provoking and fascinating and dangerous than science: magic.

Magic had given Loki and Thor temporary Midgardian identities, bank accounts, and clothing. They were, for the time being, Lee and Todd Smith, a protegé in hedge fund management and a construction worker, respectively. Jane had spent much of the van ride to the motel listening to Thor complain that not only did he not look like a "Todd," he was also heir apparent to the Asgardian throne and would not be made to masquerade as a common manual laborer. Loki had simply grinned and said that whatever the fake I.D. spell produced was what Thor would get. "Quod scripsi, scripsi," Loki had said, flashing a minuscule wink in Jane's direction.

He stepped out of the lobby now, dressed in slate gray jeans, a forest green v-neck top and a smart black leather jacket. A hilariously flawless contemporary Midgardian translation of his robes and battle armor. He'd magically assumed these clothes before stepping out of the van to place the motel reservation. Jane hadn't caught a good look at them until just now, and... well, wow. It didn't make quite the same statement as all that silk and leather and metal had, but there was something unquestionably desirable about the change. If Jane didn't know any better, she'd assume she was looking at a wealthy young executive, an incredibly eligible bachelor. She was seeing Loki stripped down to an essence, simplified... seeing him as a person instead of a demigod or a super villain - or even a prince, for that matter. He was all long limbs and sturdy shoulders and dark hair - hair that now hung a little looser, falling softly over the back of his neck and fanning out slightly behind his ears.

"Your key," he said as he approached, dangling the piece of metal from his fingers. Jane reached out and took it without letting her eyes leave his.

"Uh, Thor..." she began.

"Is in our room already," said Loki shortly. It was an absurd concept, Jane thought, the princes of Asgard sharing a shabby motel room in the Midgardian middle of nowhere. Suddenly a dissapointing thought: she would have her own room, then. Alright. Whatever. She told herself it made the most sense.

"Sorry if I'm being weird," she blurted out to fill the silence. She looked at the ground and felt Loki studying her face. She didn't even know why she was apologizing to him.

"'Weird...'" he said. "'Weird' is a fine word for our situation."

"Yyyyep," said Jane. Suddenly she just wanted to get in her room and go to sleep...

"There is some information I'm required to give you if you want to stay with us," Loki said abruptly.

Jane flashed her eyes up to meet Loki's. They'd gone cold and soft, almost plaintive, and... what was it- fearful?

She couldn't think of anything to say back.

"You do," said Loki, impatience beginning to sneak into his voice, "want to stay with us, yes?"

"Oh!" said Jane, caught off guard by the directness of the question. "Oh, yeah- yes. Yes. Don't really know what else I would do, you know, considering..."

Loki's lips strained into a hard line of a smile. "Good," he said. He ran a hand through his hair. The gesture almost didn't fit him; it seemed so common, so_ human._

He continued, his voice crawling ever lower, "We could discuss matters... in the van, or..."

Jane was flabbergasted. Her heart put the pedal to the floor. Was he really nervous about asking her to...

She cut him off. "Room's fine," she blurted.

Loki pulled his hand down from his hair and narrowed his eyes.

"I mean," Jane said, face flushing, "I mean, we can talk in my room, it's probably more... you know... secure..."

"I've conjured a magical barrier about us across a five mile radius," said Loki. He cleared his throat. "So security should not be an issue."

The air crackled. Jane felt the tingling again, the knee-jerk pulse of magic in her brain. It sent an incredibly clear message:

_Go with him_.

Jane worked the key around in her hand.

"Room's fine," she said again.

* * *

_Loki Odinson. Married man once more. He studied his reflection. It tossed him a brow-wrinkle of disdain at the spinelessness that had earned him a second arranged ball and chain. In the mirror in his chambers he saw the same face he always had: pale skin, dark lashes, sharp green eyes. Someday, perhaps, he would look tattered and tired like the sad fathers in Midgardian cartoons. Presently, however, Loki felt sharp, coiffed, confident. He barely even thought about the upcoming feast and the pressing eyes of family members who knew the score: no consummation yet. How _could_ he have consummated his marriage without being able to do so much as roll his eyes?_

_He rolled his eyes now to make up for lost time. He felt the self-imposed pressure of princehood. "Poor little rich boy." Royalty and romance, he acknowledged, made terrible bedfellows. The feast tonight would be agonizing. The faintest smack of sexual tension, the tiniest sliver of knowledge about the 'unfinished business' between Loki and his bride, would set all of Asgard's monarchs flinching at one another to a chorus of clinking silver. The mead would be flowing heavily tonight, lest someone launch himself into a diatribe about how he "knew it was just too soon for another marriage. I _knew_ it."_

_"My husband."_

_Loki started in his place by the mirror and turned to see Sigyn standing in the doorway of his chambers._

_She was dressed for the feast table, crimson gown billowing outwards in a chiffon flutter, lips bleeding scarlet against snowy skin, inky locks swirled into a loose braid. She still gave off a crackling, enigmatic energy - a screaming static that stood Loki's hair on end._

_"My lady," said Loki. He strode over to the threshold and planted his lips on her milk-white hand. He kept his eyes locked on hers. His heart thrummed._

_Sigyn arched a thin black brow. "Only my hand receives the company of your lips?" she asked coyly._

_"As a rule I usually take my dessert _after_ my meal," Loki replied, impressing himself with the steadiness of his own voice._

_Sigyn's voice dipped low and velvety. "A little secret about me: I was never very fond of rules," she said. "I prefer to think," she said, reaching up and clasping her hand around the base of Loki's neck, "they are only made to be broken."_

_Loki refused to blink. He let a grin tug his lips upward. _

_Suddenly Sigyn vaulted her mouth toward his. He shot up and index finger and caught her carmine flesh midair. He could hear her breathing through tiny, flared nostrils. Her coal-black irises smoldered in indignation. She reached her hand to bend Loki's finger away from her mouth but he twisted sideways and lined his lips up with her ear._

_"My princess," he whispered. "If breaking rules is your wish, then I am well prepared to grant it..."_

He_ controlled this marriage._

_"...after the feast."_

_And Sigyn could wait._

* * *

Jane sat on the edge of a twin bed in her motel room. The mattress squeaked like a dying animal.

Loki sat on the edge of the twin bed directly across from Jane. The mattress squealed like a stuck pig.

The two of them looked at one another.

Jane thought Loki might be able to hear her heartbeat. Each thump was a massive sonic blast.

"I apologize for earlier," Loki said. "It was rude of me to carry on with Thor without including you."

Jane swallowed. "It's okay," she said.

It wasn't okay. But Jane didn't care. Her head was filled with whirring helium.

The bedside lamp flickered between them with a faint electric sizzle. Loki's eyes flashed a shade greener in the strobing lamplight.

"Thank you, um..." said Jane, "for earlier. For the healing. I think I already said thank you, but..."

Loki palmed his hair again. "The sentiment is," he said softly, "appreciated."

Jane smiled a watery smile. A week and a half ago, it would have shocked her to hear him say that.

"'Nothing important' happened whilst Thor was away, hm?" asked Loki. He eyebrows pinched, his mouth drawn into a knowing smile. "You dropping me on the floor, and grasping my hand as I lay ill, and me bewitching the entirety of your little 'fitness club...' All nothing, of course."

"Nothing Thor needed to know," said Jane. She persed her lips.

"A conspiracy against the fair Asgardian heir? I like the way you think."

Jane smirked, averted her eyes. The air was thick and hot.

"So..." Jane said. She stared at the grubby comforter. "So... What did you want to talk to me about?"

She could feel Loki shifting across from her with the squeak of springs. Loki, god of mischief, God of Mischief, shifting across from her. Oh...

The room misted over. It hurt to breathe.

Loki's voice dipped into darkness, quiet. "Believe it or not, I was a young... demigod, I suppose is what you'd call it... I was a young demigod. And in that youth, I was wedded to a noblewoman - Sigyn - who gave me a wealth of... carnal experience." He half-blinked-half-winced. "Experience that I never truly asked for in the first place, having had my fair share with my first wife, who unbeknownst to me was a fellow frost giant..."

Loki shifted himself closer to the edge of the bed. Closer to Jane. She heard the faint squeak of springs under the pounding of her heart.

"Sigyn," Loki continued, "was honorable in many respects, and fair. And, as I mentioned, very... forward. She shared my aptitude for mischief. She was unruly, she was... alive. Rarely did she take no as an answer. She thoroughly enjoyed my presence, and I foolishly believed throughout our marriage that she..."

Loki shook his head, closed his eyes.

"But she did not," he said. "She did not truly care one whit for me. Nor for Asgard. Sigyn's secret, the thing that kept her committed as an Asgardian bride..."

Jane held her breath.

Loki's knees brushed the inside of hers.

* * *

_Loki pressed Sigyn against the wall of the corridor. He could no longer hear the clinking of silver in the feast hall. _

_His head swam. All the control he'd felt in his chambers slipped._

_"I thought you said you took your dessert _after_ your meals," said Sigyn, her back against the wall, "rather than _during_."_

_"Shsh," said Loki. He held Sigyn's arms against the marble and looked at her. Her eyes smoked._

_"Thank you for rescuing me," smiled Sigyn. "The feast was as intolerable as we'd guessed."_

_The clinking of silver. The thrumming of his heart. The taste of the ham._

_The taste of her lips. _

_Loki gripped her jaw in his hand and crashed his mouth into hers._

_Teeth met in a small, hard _clack_. _

_She smelled of blood oranges and musk._

_Her canine clamped his lip and he tasted blood._

_Mischief._

_Loki pulled his head back. Sigyn lashed her jaw out and clicked her teeth together, snapping at the air like a wolf._

_"I love you," he said._

_"You lie."_

_"I do not."_

_"Then I want to hear you say it again."_

_"Once was enough."_

_"_Say_ it _again_."_

_"I love you."_

_Sigyn ran a sharp-tipped nail down his cheekbone from his ear to his mouth._

_"Good."_

___ Her lipstick had his blood on it._

_"Let us forgo the rest of the feast," she said._

* * *

"Sigyn wanted mortality," said Loki.

Jane looked up from the floor. The lamp buzzed.

"I don't get it," she said. "Asgardians can't die at all?"

"Sigyn wanted more than a demigod's mortality – she wanted a human life."

"But... why?"

"There are certain advantages. Mortals feel more profoundly. Their candles burn shorter. Everything is quick and vital."

"That's not always true," said Jane. "People take life for granted all the time."

Loki stared into space somewhere behind Jane. He looked so tired.

"Sigyn would not have," he said.

The desert wind whistled in the doorjamb.

"You..." struggled Jane. "You loved her."

Loki inhaled sharply through his nose.

The bathroom faucet dripped.

"It is difficult to say what I truly felt for her," he said.

"It would take more Merlot?" Jane smiled ruefully. Her chest felt wrong.

Loki smiled back, his eyes pained.

"It would take words that humans could not comprehend."

* * *

_Sigyn's back was to the wall again._

_The wall belonged to Loki's chambers._

_"I want to make something clear," she said._

_Loki attached his lips to her collarbone._

_"I can never love you."_

_"I care not," murmured Loki, taking a fistful of her hair, fondling the collar of her dress._

_"You will care, though you do not know it yet."_

_"I tend not to dwell on the future."_

_"You might want to start."_

_Loki felt a jolt of fear and yanked himself away from her. The room went white._

_"What are you doing?" he asked. "What are you doing in Asgard?"_

_Sigyn smoothed her hair down, chuckling._

_"Making love to my husband," she said._

_"You know that is not the answer I seek."_

_He felt his eyes bulge. He clenched his hands until his fingernails drew blood from his palms._

_"What?" he asked, practically begged. "What do you want?"_

_Sigyn turned her eyes up at him. They gleamed fiercely._

_"A mortal life," she said. _

_"Preposterous," said Loki. "__Æsir do not abuse the properties of human life; that is among Asgard's most basic policies. _I shall give you no such thing._"_

_"Yet you said you loved me only moments ago."_

_"I have been made to eat my words before," fumed Loki. "It is not beneath me to do it again. Here are some words that I shall not eat: the instant you turn me against this kingdom will mark the end of any affection I may have felt for you."  
_

_"Such a quick tongue, my Lord. You have not even heard my proposal."_

_"And already it smacks of betrayal."_

_"Betrayal will not be the only obstacle you will face if you do not heed my words."_

_Sigyn to a slow step, drew in close to him._

_"Poor, naïve princeling," said Sigyn, "you should know by now that there are forces more powerful than you."_

_"In case you have not noticed," countered Loki, "Heimdall doles out only the most vital information. I am not privy to matters that do not concern me."_

_"And that is the problem with royalty, hm?" said Sigyn. "You are hidden up in this gleaming tower, expected to be a diplomat to peoples you do not truly _know_, unaware of their struggles, their suffering. You do not even know the full breadth of your own magic, let alone what magic lies beyond your imagination."_

_She pressed herself against him. Her fingers worked the collar of his robes._

_"You have not known fear," she whispered. "Or pain. You haven't _tasted_ it."_

_"I have spent my fair share of time in the shadows," Loki said. His jaw tightened._

_"In the shadow of the Asgardian throne, yes," said Sigyn. "But in the shadows of dark realms? The shadows of poverty, of hunger, of_ need? _The dark side of the moon?"_

_"You threaten me."_

_"I could bribe you if you wish," said Sigyn. "Although I sense you are someone for whom negative reinforcement works best."_

_"Give me your terms."_

_"I teach you to use your magic and grant me one mortal life. One. That is all."_

_"And if I do not comply?"_

_"Baldr returns home in a... sorry state."_

_Loki's stomach catapulted into his throat._

_"How do you know-"_

_"Again, my husband," said Sigyn. "There are powerful forces lurking just under the nose of this palace."_

_"Odin will stop you."_

_"He will not stop me, because you will not inform a __single ____Æsir about this."_

_____"Or-"_

_____"Or some associates of mine will endeavor to educate you on the myriad forms of pain to which you are so blissfully ignorant."_

_____"Then I shall risk the impromptu 'lesson' and go to Odin regardless."_

_____Suddenly a sharp white light blasted and strobed through Loki's vision. Pain knifed across his brow and he crumpled. Sigyn's arms held him on his dragging feet._

_____"I've just broken Baldr's finger," she said, her voice low as thunder._

_____Loki let his head loll back and groaned._

_____"Allow me to elaborate," Sigyn said calmly. "I have employed some incredibly skilled magicians, connections of my family. They have agreed to serve as magical conduits to me. I control them. They do my bidding. I have told them, using my sharp mental capabilities, to reach out across the heavens and snap Baldr's finger. And if they are doing their job correctly, they have manipulated Baldr such that he believes he broke his_ own _finger. One hundred percent untraceable magic. Untraceable except that you are made to feel, quite painfully, every affliction that befalls your brother. Your suffering will mirror his. Nod if you understand."_

_Loki nodded._

_"I'm going to say it again: there are forces in Asgard – _in Asgard _- that could rip this kingdom to shreds from within. It will start with Baldr if you do not meet my demands."_

_Loki eased himself painfully back onto his feet. He shifted, testing his balance._

_"And if I do meet them?"_

_Sigyn smiled broadly, red lips parting to flash small white teeth._

_"Then you will be given the most loyal, caring and sensual wife the Nine Realms did ever behold."_

_Loki stared at Sigyn in shock, trying in earnest to keep his face unreadable, to check his thumping heart. Her eyes blasted blackness from their sockets, nestled in sweet porcelain skin. He was looking at a dangerous woman, walking on eggshells, staring down from the taught line of a tightrope._

_She was dangerous, yes, but she could give him a wife, a purpose. And she could give him __knowledge – the knowledge that his choices, his policymaking decisions, could tear apart the entire kingdom._

_She was giving him _power_._

_And it felt magnificent._

_"Make love to me," he heard himself growl. He reached out with trembling hands and cupped her face._

_"You agree to my terms then," she said, her lips brushing his as she spoke._

_Loki wrenched her head to the side and took the top of her ear in his mouth._

_"Shut up," he said._

_Sigyn laughed, deep and dark. She pressed both her hands to his back and ran them slowly downward._

_"Oh, Prince of Asgard..." she panted. She leaned her mouth up to the side of his head:_

_"You have a long way to fall."_

* * *

"Hey," said Jane, trying desperately to break the silence.

"Hm," said Loki, gaping into space.

"I don't think you, um... I don't think you finished your story."

Loki shook his head a bit, looked at the ground in a gesture as feeble as melting snow.

"Sigyn," he said, "promised me the most loyal company I could ask for should I grant her mortality. For a long while, she fulfilled that promise. She cared for me as only the best wife could. She bore me two beautiful sons. As the years passed, and against all odds, she came to be a sort of friend. She filled spaces within myself I had not known existed."

Loki twiddled the zipper pull on his jacket and sighed.

"And then, suddenly, the marriage lost control. She was pressured by her family's connections to become mortal. They claimed she had done enough for Asgard. In her desperation she began to threaten me. I could tell she was not ready, had grown close to me and did not truly want to hurt me. But it was difficult for her. She wanted to fulfill a destiny I would not give to her. I called her bluff time and time again, and slowly the last vestiges of trust between us were torn asunder. And in a wild, last-ditch attempt to get me to repay her loyalty, she..."

Loki took a deep breath. His eyes darkened.

"She lashed out. She concentrated magical forces on me and turned me against Baldr, my brother, a truly beloved figure to the Asgardian people."

He clasped his hands together so hard his knuckles blanched.

"I killed him," he said flatly. "The court went into hysterics. Even Sigyn was appalled at what she had done. I kept my promise and told no one of Sigyn's abilities. Odin saw no other option but to punish me. And now, I believe, comes the part most humans have read about in myths: my sons were pitted against one another. They died by each other's hands. Sigyn and I were forced to watch. I could not look at her. I could decide at the time which was more powerful – my grief at the deaths of my sons, or my rage at the woman who had made their deaths possible."

The faucet dripped.

"I was shackled, with the guts of my own son, beneath a monstrous snake, positioned just so that venom could drip from its fangs and onto my prone form. Sigyn was allowed to hold a bowl and catch most of the venom before it hit me. But the pain..."

He screwed his eyes up and shook his eyes. Jane's eyes clouded with tears.

"The pain of the drops that did hit... drove me to madness. I cursed Sigyn in a thousand tongues, wished dreadful things upon her and her family, tossed out every filthy name I could imagine. I tore her down until she could barely hold the bowl, she sobbed so wretchedly..."

Loki pressed his palm to his forehead and took several short, gasping breaths.

"After it was over she left," he said weakly. His voice was strained, panicky. "Tired of waiting, she herself performed the spell that would grant her mortality, but she... she was ill-advised. Hasty. She botched the spell and her soul was wrenched from her, horribly, painfully. Blinded, lacking all memory, her soul was left to aimlessly wander the Nine Realms – a ghost... a wraith. And I know nothing about this wraith but two simple facts:"

He turned his eyes up towards Jane.

"The first thing I know is that it still exists. The second thing: it is extremely, dangerously enraged. And all of its anger is directed towards me."

Jane felt sick.

"There is a third thing I know, almost for certain," said Loki. He sucked air in through his nose. "Some time a few Midgardian decades ago... Sigyn's soul somehow found earth. It was granted the human life it so desperately sought. It was born as a mortal, wiped clean of all memories, given a blank slate, a chance at new life."

Jane's heart throbbed. There was something in Loki's voice, some edge that she couldn't stand. She wanted him to stop talking but she _needed_ him to continue.

"Faint traces of Sigyn's old self might have remained underneath this new, human identity. Traces of anger, unspeakable power. But otherwise she would be completely unrecognizable... Unrecognizable, that is... except to me."

No. No no no no no.

"Jane..." Loki began.

"Stop," Jane whimpered. She felt sobs cut into her breath like knives. "Please, I don't... I can't..."

Loki reached out a long, pale hand and took both of Jane's at once. She gasped but didn't pull away. The lamp buzzed. Loki stood, slowly, and sat, slowly, directly next to her. He took his other hand and gently, _gently_ tipped her chin upward. Tears spilled onto her lap.

The faucet dripped.

Loki's green eyes glowed.

"Jane," he said again. He swallowed. He held onto her chin.

"She's _you_."

Jane shuddered. The room spun. Loki reached the hand that was on her chin and wiped tears from her eyes and cheeks. Jane breathed deeply. His face was so close, his eyes so green, and she felt so... lost...

"I'm..." she struggled, "I'm sorry..."

Loki closed in, slow, gentle... And leaned his forehead against hers.

"Please Jane," he whispered. "Please..."

His eyes were wet...

The lamp buzzed...

Loki's deep voice:

"Do not apologize."

Him, siting there, all of him. In front of her. His eyes, his face, his hair, his voice.

His lips.

Jane breathed in.

She leaned upward just as Loki loomed down at her and kissed him.

And kissed him.

Kissed him.

Kissed.

Him.

The faucet was dripping.

* * *

**More soon, you guys...**

**In the meantime, gimme those reactions! ;)**

**Thanks, everyone!**


	25. IMPORTANT Author Note: BEWARE SPOILERS

**SPOILER ALERTS UP THE WAZOO FOR CHAPTER 23:**

**REPEAT - DO NOT READ WITHOUT HAVING READ THE LATEST CHAP!**

**A little response to a guest review. Wanted to clear some stuff up:**

**Jane fans!**

**Do not worry; Jane's character isn't going to change at all! I'll explain this more in the next chapter, but basically:**

**Sigyn's soul being given a human life "as Jane" DOES NOT MEAN Jane's personality has at all been shaped or altered by it. **

**It's basically the equivalent of reincarnation. For example, if I have ever had a past life, I wouldn't know much about it, and chances are it wouldn't affect my personality very much. So, Sigyn was Jane in a past life. Loki can make out very faint traces of Sigyn when he is around Jane because (a) he was married to Sigyn for centuries and (b) he's, well, magical. **

**So from here on out, Jane's character and personality will remain completely INTACT. The real struggle will be dealing with magical capabilities she may or may not have. (Which would explain how Loki was able to get in her head wayyyy back in early chapters, etc.).**

**Anyway, thank you all for your wise words and critiques. It helps me understand where I'm being unclear and what you'd like to see going forward!**

**:)**


	26. Chapter 24

**Hi guys!**

**I HAVE A _REQUEST_. Because I'm lazy and don't have a tumblr, LJ, what have you, I need some PROMOTIONS on those sites! Just want more Lokane fans to know this is out there and be able to give feedback etc.**

**So here's the deal. If you post about this fic anywhere on the interwebs, I will WRITE YOU ANY ONE-SHOT YOU WANT. That's right. Anything. Any prompt. Just send me a link to the place you promoted the story in a private message _with_ your fic prompt, and I'll get it to you! **

**Yay.**

**More business: I've been slower to update for several reasons. (1) Now that we're pretty deep into the story, I don't want the story cannon to affect character integrity too much (i.e. I'm putting extra effort in to make sure no one gets OOC). (2) I wanna make sure I'm answering the many great questions you're all posing. I _have_ answers, but I have to be careful about when/where I give them to y'all.**

****To concerned/flipping out readers about the end of now-infamous Chapter 23...** Loved the reactions. Hah. And I swear to you, all shall be revealed/explained/reconciled in a way that will be both satisfying and (for the sake of fun) surprising.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

She tasted like dew.

Her lips were cool and fresh and soothing as morning mountain air, as sweet as...

As sweet as his wedding kiss with Sigyn had been – the touch of soft frost on his fevered face, the lips of an angel. And now with the heat of the New Mexico evening swarming around them, the kiss was all the more a deep, cold refuge. An oasis.

Loki had no idea who had leaned in first. Sentiment beckoned, told him they had come together as one, moving at the same pace, in cosmic sync. After all, higher beings had a way of finding one another at precisely the same moment.

How he ached for it to be that simple. He burned for this beautiful little woman to be just like the wife who had come to know his every thought, who had finished his sentences. Simplicity, however, was an unattainable luxury in the life of a demigod. Loki realized that it was not literally Sigyn that he wanted; he wanted Jane, but he wanted her to _know _him, as Sigyn had, without having to spend centuries breaking out of his shell and building trust.

But Sigyn, he reminded himself, was not the one kissing him.

This was Jane Foster, small and doe-like, alive with quirks and strong of heart. Sigyn's soul could never overcome Jane's spirit. It was Jane's vitality, her compassion, her _humanity_ that granted her such extraordinary beauty. Jane compressed his heart, melted the ice that cramped his thoughts, unwound his nerves into warm taffy rivulets. In her presence now, Loki knew why she had taken him from his cell - she had wanted to help him because she was simply that kind, that faithful. She'd given him the second chance that his own homeland had refused him. She had tended to him despite his griping and malevolence and grudge-holding. She'd provoked tears that had not fallen in ages.

She was not Sigyn, not completely.

She was far better.

When they finally withdrew from one another Loki took a deep breath, inhaling the aftertaste of Jane's mouth. Their eyes locked; Jane's glittered with tears and the shock of discovery. He furrowed his brow and stared into her, smiling faintly and hoping emphatically that she was pleased. O! Valhalla, let her be pleased.

He realized he was panting.

Jane frowned.

"Did we..." she said. "Did you just do that because I'm... because I'm her?"

Loki's heart filled with lead. The irony of it all threatened to burn up his brain. Why did she have to be born Jane Foster, of all the mortals in all the corners of the Earth...?

"No. No, no." Loki leaned down so that his face was level with Jane's. "We did it because you are _you_."

Jane worried her lower lip with her teeth. Her frown deepened for a fraction of a second and then...

She let out a tiny, almost astonished laugh. She turned her face up at him and asked in the smallest honey-sweet voice:

"Then, wow, um... could we do it again?"

His lips were on hers before she'd barely finished speaking.

Her hand connected with his shoulder in a clumsy attempt to embrace him and he crashed sideways onto the spongy motel mattress, bringing Jane down with him. Suprised, she cried out without pulling away from the kiss. Her voice vibrated through Loki's teeth. A chill ran down his spine like a lightning bolt.

They pulled back. Jane gazed at him, wide-eyed.

"This is... crazy," she gasped.

Loki's chest whirred.

"I am well aware of that."

"I like it, though."

Loki chuckled, "Such a simple sentiment."

"But it's _true!_" exclaimed Jane, defensively, happily, like a child who had discovered that a caterpillar could become a butterfly.

Loki could not think to do anything but look upon her. Was there any part of him that knew, all those eons ago in SHIELD containment, that he would see her as he saw her now - hair falling over her shoulders and across the comforter, face centimeters away, his reflection staring at him from the surface her pupils...

"I don't want this to stop," she said. "I just... I have so many questions that I... feel need asking."

"I am as open a book as you will ever find."

"Okay..." Jane blinked slowly. She tensed as if preparing to sit up, then relaxed back into the bed. She narrowed her eyes, inquisitive, ever the shrewd little scientist.

Loki had never noticed how maddeningly attractive he found that expression.

"How... How am _I_ Sigyn?"

Loki inhaled, catching the scent of her hair. "Chance," he said. "Or perhaps fate, but I have neither the authority nor the knowledge to call it so. You know of the religious concept of reincarnation?"

Jane nodded. "But is it really that inexplicable?"

"At time the universe is mysterious even to gods," Loki smiled wanly. "This is one of those times."

"Why don't I remember anything about her life... Or about you, for that matter?"

"If I were to tell you that you'd been George Washington in a past life, would you be asking the same question?"

"Hey, sarcasm!"

"I speak in earnest. Why does it matter to you whether Sigyn's memories were preserved?"

"Why won't _you _answer my question?"

The words smacked Loki in the face. He drew his mouth into a tight line.

"Because," he said, "I do not want to dwell on Sigyn's memories, lest something triggers them and... and you change somehow. I don't speak in jest when I say that _you _are who's compelled me. I had not known anything about the connection between the two of you until quite recently."

"When?" asked Jane. Her voice was less persistent, more tender, curious. "When did you know?"

"For certain? In soothe..." He closed his eyes and brought tense fingers to his temple. Damned irony and it's dogged predation on his personal life. "I knew when you... reacted in a strongly positive manner toward my magical ministrations."

Jane bolted upright on the bed and buried her face in her hands.

"Oh God," she moaned. "That's just... _Agh _it's so _embarrassing._"

"Now you know why some call me 'Prince of Lies,'" said Loki. "The truth is often embarrassing."

"Please, no jokes right now," said Jane from behind her hands.

No, no, no. She couldn't be angry. She _couldn't_ be upset. Loki dwelled on the desperation of that thought for a moment, then sat up and pulled Jane's hands gently away from her eyes. He put on his best earnest expression. (He'd forgotten what an earnest expression felt like, so it was a bit of a shot in the dark).

"If I ever speak in jest towards you," he said, dipping his chin, "it is because you have rendered me happy enough to do so. I have not told a joke without malice in... in so very long."

"That's probably true," laughed Jane. She fell away from him, flopping on her back on the bed. "God, what do I do now, though? Was it even worth it to tell me...?"

"I thought you deserved to know..."

"No– No, just... Stop telling me white lies. There's something dangerous about this, isn't there?"

How easily she could rip up his heart now that it belonged to her.

Loki hesitated.

"There is always danger involved in the affairs of gods."

"Come on," said Jane. "Being cryptic isn't sexy right now."

"Then you admit it was sexual before..."

"_Loki!_"

He sighed and wrung his hands in his lap.

"Jane... Do you believe that I could ever let anything bad befall you?"

"What about the van crash?"

"Anything _permanently_ bad?"

A pregnant pause.

"...No."

"Good. There is a potential for danger in this situation because the magicians that worked for Sigyn's family... They are searching for her. And the first place they often think to look is wherever I am. Their breed of magic is sordid and unpredictable – as is most dark magic. I have felt traces of it, dogging me, lingering on me, ever since I left Asgard. As I told Thor, it's followed me here. And I do not want it near you, for obvious reasons."

"How would I know whether it was near me?"

"The second time you came crashing into the containment area at SHIELD, you were very irate and complained that I had 'gotten in your head.'"

"Mm-hm?"

"I never did attempt to do that. None of that was me. It must have been Sigyn's magicians... testing you... seeing how you would respond to a small magical attack. Seeing if you would respond and return to my cell. They would have the two pieces of the puzzle, the proof: you and I together."

"But I really thought..." struggled Jane. He could hear her voce clog with tears. "I really thought me wanting to see you... I don't know... that it meant more than just some magical influence. At the time, I thought maybe it was science, or... Or just... This sounds so stupid... I thought maybe it was destiny, or something."

Loki's chest crumbled. The difficulty of explaining it all...

"Your... feelings, your emotions and desires... You must trust me when I say they have nothing to do with this – nothing to do with magic."

A sniffle from Jane. Loki felt a gnawing sensation in the back of his head, a completely foreign feeling...

He had an uncontrollable urge to stop talking.

"I want to show you something," he said.

* * *

Jane blinked back her headache.

She saw Loki lower himself onto his back so that they were side by side on the motel comforter. He raised a pale hand toward the pockmarked ceiling and tensed his jaw.

A dark cloud swirled and grew from Loki's outstretched hand and floated up to the ceiling. The darkness spread itself into a wide circle that seemed... somehow deep, as though it had opened the roof of the motel out to the sky.

Jane blinked again, and realized an image was forming in the inky blackness.

Two young boys. One about a foot taller than the other, probably five or so years older. They each had dark hair and smooth, solemn features. One's eyes were dark, almost black; the other's were bottle green. Something was vaguely off about their faces... They looked questioning, almost lost, like they were reaching out to her, or trying to tell her something.

The green eyes of the older one caught hers and she gasped in realization. Without warning she felt tears spring to her eyes. Her chest sunk and hitched.

"They..." she said, fighting to stifle a sob. "Oh, God... Loki... They're your sons, aren't they?"

She couldn't tear her eyes from their pale faces. Loki gave no verbal response but in her peripheral she saw him nod, just barely.

"They're..." she bit down on her lip. Fat, hot tears rolled down her cheeks. "They're so beautiful."

In the corner of her vision, Loki was screwing up his mouth in a terrible, jagged shape. His brows came together and he drew a shaky, tight breath through his nose.

"I know..." he wheezed.

Jane sobbed.

"Which one is..."

"Váli... is the elder. Narfi is the younger."

They stared down out of the blackness.

Loki corrected himself: "Was," he said.

He inhaled jaggedly.

"Were. They were my sons. Mine and Sigyn's."

It was too much. Jane let herself cry for several long moments, hearing the desert wind whistle under the door.

The faces receded slowly into the black as Loki's hand crumbled into a fist.

"I'm glad," said Jane, "I'm glad I got to see them."

Loki smiled weakly.

"They would have enjoyed meeting you."

Jane wiped the fresh tears from her face with her palm.

"Could you ever," she struggled, "God... you know... use magic to..."

"Bring them back?" Loki sighed. He looked tired and ill. "They would never be quite the same. Death does not enjoy being fooled."

"Why... Why did you show them to me?"

Jane winced, realizing how dumb the question sounded once she'd asked it.

Loki gave her a sad smile.

"When they were born... Váli, and then Narfi... They showed me love that I never imagined could exist. It'd been the same with my other children, but these two stayed with me the longest. I was allowed to be a father to them. And when I could be with them, they taught me so much. What they gave, they gave so selflessly: love, and joy, and hope. They made me stronger and happier for having known them."

His smile turned to a grimace. He rubbed his face with the heels of his hands.

"When they were taken from me, I let myself forget all those things they had taught me. All that innocence and beauty and wonder, gone. It tore me and Sigyn to pieces. Thor tried to be present, to be brotherly toward me. But the throne beckoned. It was so close he could taste it. And Baldr was dead, presumably by my hand. So Thor turned away."

Jane tried not to listen to the faucet dripping.

"After Sigyn's soul left, I lay in my chambers and conjured the image of them over and over. I would stare at it all night without sleeping. I wanted so badly just to be with them, or something that recalled them to me. But as time wore on the image became hollow. Their faces gaped and taunted me with their vacancy and emptiness. It enraged me so much that I abandoned their memory completely, buried my grief. I became little, selfish, erratic. One minute I wanted the throne, the next I thought I would burn Asgard to the ground, my family, all of it."

Her turned his face towards her. His eyes burned emerald.

"The reason I showed Váli and Narfi to you, Jane, is because meeting you and growing closer to you has reminded me, after all my time spent in the company of shadows, of the joy and kindness that my sons gave me while they lived. Being in your presence tonight made me aware, for the first time in ages, of how much I had given up by letting their memory go."

Jane felt tears threaten again.

"Loki..."

"My point is that you have become something special to me, no matter how we met. I am not trying to tell you that we were brought together completely of our own accord. But as long as I am able to protect you, why should it matter whether magic played a roll on our finding one another? Or even science? I have never been one to let excuses place sanctions on my actions, whether those actions were for good or ill. The same applies to my attraction to you."

"Hey..." said Jane. "You um, you don't have to explain yourself. Thank you... for letting me in. It sounds cheesy, but... It's good to trust someone again."

Loki grinned. Jane saw the characteristic spark reignite his irises.

"Regardless of whether that someone happens to be the god of mischief?"

Jane smiled, "Regardless. Your flirting is a little unconventional, but..."

"Convention is for mortals," Loki said with a wink.

Jane blushed, looked down, and realized their fingers had been woven together on the mattress.

* * *

_"Do you want to meet your nephew, brother?"_

_Thor almost did not recognize Loki sitting in the chair in he and Sigyn's chambers. His dark head was bent downward, transfixed on the bundle he held more gently than an eggshell. He lifted his face to look at Thor. His eyes were misted with traces of dewy tears and brimming with happiness. He held his mouth taught as though unsure whether to laugh or sob or both._

_Thor peered over the edge of the cloth. A tiny, peach-pale face, bright green eyes blinking owlishly, a swatch of black hair. _

_"Does it really bear mentioning who he resembles?" Thor asked with a knowing smile. "Or is it so obvious that I would sound dimwitted to suggest it?"_

_Loki shook his head and chuckled. "Just like his mother," he said._

_Thor roared with laughter. _

_"Ah brother, do not flatter the child so, it will grow up spoiled!"_

_Loki gaped at him in mock indignation._

_"In soothe," said Thor, his laughter settling. "He is the spitting image of his father. Handsome, dapper, and already he looks as though he could outsmart me."_

_Loki grinned and smooth the blankets on either side of the babe's head. Thor reached to wipe a tear from his own eye._

_"He will..." Thor choked through his tears, "He will make Asgard proud. As you have, brother."_

_The god of mischief beamed. "Already he makes _me _proud."_

_Thor laid a hand on his brother's shoulder. _

_"Congratulations, Loki."_

_"Thank you." Loki inhaled and shook his head, smiling ear to ear._

_"Thank you, brother."_

* * *

**Writing this chapter has turned me into a puddle of goo. I am now goo.**

**More plot development next! More mystery solving! More Lokane! Yes!**

**Thanks everyone!**

**PS - Remember, if you promote the fic I'll gift you a one-shot of your choosing!**

**:)**


	27. Chapter 25

**Everybody! Hi!**

**Still making good on my promise to update quicker I think.**

**Really special thanks and hello to my new reviewers and followers. It's great to have you aboard! I hope you enjoy every word. :)**

**Special warnings for LANGUAGE in this chapter. A very special, but very potty-mouthed character is going to make her presence known... ;)**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

After Loki left for the night, Jane turned on the shower, cranked the tap from "H" to "C," and sat on the floor of the stall with her arms around her knees.

Sitting in the shower was far less tragically glamorous than movies made it out to be. It felt more than a little bit like drowning. She closed her eyes and tried to breath through her nose.

Loki's face was burnt into the backs of her eyelids. Her brain played a loop of him holding her head in his hands, staring at her as though unsure what to do with her face, smiling tightly, getting off the mattress and walking out the door. It'd been one of the weirdest good-byes in history. She hadn't said a word. In the Nicholas Sparks version she would've bolted off the bed and cried, _"Wait!"_ and would have run over and thrown her arms around him. And he probably would have picked her up and twirled her around and kissed her long and deep on the mouth.

And then it would have started raining.

And twinkling fairies would have fallen out of the sky and coated them in freaking pixie dust.

Whoop-dee-do.

Jane actually didn't mind dwelling on that fantasy, because it meant _not_ thinking about the fact that she was a reincarnated mortal version of a demigod's wife, who had in a past life borne two children and then tricked her husband into killing his brother.

The cold shower wasn't changing the fact that her reality was, at this point, way way _way_ stranger than her fantasies.

Surreal. It was all surreal. How about science? Where had it gone, science, the old friend that always had the answer to everything – where was the safety and sureness of numbers and equations and theorems and the _goddamn scientific method?_

Oh, right. There was no scientific study on godly reincarnation.

Jane couldn't even wrap her mind around the sheer _numbers_ involved in all this. Sigyn had been older than Loki, so... How many years had Sigyn been alive before her soul had been tossed out into the universe? Thousands? Millions? Jane tried thinking about a year, one year: spring, summer, fall, winter. Holidays: Easter, Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. She tried multiplying all that by 1,000... Nothing. No concept of how that amount of time felt whatsoever.

Okay... a decade. The 90's. High school, college, Spice Girls, Buffy, Backstreet Boys. She tried multiplying it all by one hundred. One hundred decades.

Nothing.

She was starting to shiver under the cold water. She got up slowly and turned the tap off, and leaned against the shower wall. She breathed and tried clearing her mind and meditating like her friends had tried to get her to do in college.

A friend... That was what she needed right now. Someone to talk to, someone to unload the past week on. Someone who existed in the real world, outside of all this craziness, but who wouldn't have to have the entire "demigods and magic" thing explained to them.

Jane stepped out of the shower, toweled off and headed for the room's phone.

She knew exactly who to call.

* * *

The desert heat was beginning to irk him.

Heat was third on his list of pet peeves, and currently even at night it was doing its best to earn that distinction.

Loki had a list of pet peeves. They were, at least he thought, surprisingly few.

First on the list was embarrassment. Being caught off guard, flustered, ruffled. And in Jane's motel room, he had embarrassed himself enough for five evenings, let alone one.

Perhaps embarrassment was not the correct term. There was no shame in what had taken place, only...

Vulnerability.

There was, he realized, a new name for his first pet peeve. And it was without question vulnerability.

But confusion of confusions... Some of his happiest times had just been spent being vulnerable before Jane.

Loki leaned against the stucco wall of the motel between Jane's and his and Thor's rooms. His lower back still did not appreciate the pressure, having just recently evicted a chunk of lead, but he was too sapped of energy to stand on his own and far too flustered (there it was, pet peeve number one) to be in Thor's presence.

Every last instinct was screaming at him to return to his most recent default setting: cold, choleric, bitter. How easy it had been to laugh in the faces of mortals, to debase those costumed ninnies, to fly about and explode buildings. Alas, those dark deeds no longer composed the exoskeleton under which he once hid. Not anymore. After what he now called The Motel Room Encounter, he was more exposed than the fleshy underbelly of a Chitaurian war whale. He had fallen prey to Jane's loveliness, and charm, and beauty and compassion and tenderness... And how could he possibly be irate when he was surrounded by _that much_ goodness? Jane's virtue stretched beyond sentimentality, simply because there was no emptiness to it. She was all _substance_: both smart and sensitive, bold and gracious.

And had it been cathartic, to kiss her, to bare all to her, to revisit the image of his sons that he'd hidden away for so long? Certainly.

But the thrill of first contact had gone. He'd exhaled it all – all the heightened emotion and resurfaced grief and profound joy – the moment he'd shut the door to Jane's room, a literal gesture for an emotional fallout. Yes, yes, the exhilaration was gone, and infernal awkwardness had risen up from the bowels of some blighted romance hell to take its place.

He was a young groom again, shuffling his feet in his wedding robes, picking at his too-tight collar, frustrated to feel bonded to a woman.

And beyond that... He was completely drained. He tried standing up off the stucco for a moment and was alarmed to discover his knees trembled. A thin film of cold sweat sprinkled his neck and tickled his collarbone. Curse his unjustifiable need for on-trend Midgardian clothing... Leather jacket in the sweltering heat, simply ridiculous...

Back against the wall he went.

The stars, he noted absently, really were lovely tonight.

* * *

_"Yeah, whaddaya want?"_

"Darce...?"

_"Oh holy shitballs. Jane Foster."_

"Uh... Yeah..."

_"I haven't heard from you in friggin' _months_! Dude, are you even alive?"_

"Uh... Yes."

_"Where are you? Are you drunk? Are you kidnapped in some freaky fuck's basement? Do you need me to come get you?"_

"Nnnnnno... At least I don't think so."

And you probably couldn't find me anyway...

_"Well what's up, lady, spill the beans!"_

"I'm..."

_"Oh shit, you're pregnant!"_

"...No."

_"Sorry sorry sorry. Sorry. I interrupted you. Okay start again."_

"I'm in New Mexico..."

_"Well, duh. Agh, sorry, sorry! Keep going."_

"I mean I'm in... A motel in New Mexico, in like the middle of nowhere... With, uh... We'll I'm with Thor..."

_"Fuuuuuuuck! Are you guys... Waitwait- you guys didn't _do_ it, did you?"_

"No! No. I'm with Thor and, uh... Uh..."

Just say it.

"Thor and his brother. Thor and Loki."

Here we go.

_"Shut... the front... door."_

"I know, I know..."

_"But really, I mean, holy _balls_, Jane..."_

"I know..."

_"Dude's like, _majorly_ psycho. You know that, right? He like blew up a whole freaking city."_

"Well actually..."

_"Do you know, Jane, what no longer exists because of him?"_

Oh boy.

"No, Darcy, what no longer exists?"

_"Gray's Papaya."_

"What...?"

_"Yep. Fucker fucking _blew up_ Gray's Papaya."_

"..."

_"You're not seriously trying to tell me you don't know what Gray's Papaya is."_

"Um... Yeah, Darce, I don't-"

_"Gray's Papaya was the place where Darcy _used_ to go to get a kosher brat and a strawberry daiquiri-"_

"Ew..."

_"...but now she can't _get_ those things anymore because a buncha fucked up lizard aliens and a skinny greasy guy in an antelope hat BLEW IT. THE FUCK. UP."_

"Okay... You're angry, so I'm just gonna-"

_"NOPLEASEJANE. Please don't go, okay? I'm really sorry, tell me about your struggles."_

"Okay..."

_"Okay?"_

"Okay. So... I just have to cut to this point and I'll explain the rest after... I kissed him."

_"I mean okay, that's kinda old news but... Woooooo! Score one for Jane Foster, mackin' on that blonde Norse god babe!"_

"Um... Yeah... Actually..."

_"What? It wasn't as good as you thought it'd be? Bummer."_

"No... No, it was... It was good, it just..."

_"...What? It just what?"_

Say it.

"It wasn't Thor."

Fuck.

_"Jane..."_

"...Yeah?"

_"Jane, tell me there's like, a third dude with you or something."_

"Uh..."

_"Because seriously, I'm like... throwing up in my mouth a little bit."_

"Yeah... No, there's... There's no one else..."

_"Jane I'm throwing up, okay? I'm puking like, right now. It's unpleasant. I ate a really gnarly slice of pizza for dinner."_

"Darcy, come on!"

_"What? _What?_ When you call me up after weeks of literally zero contact and tell me you made out with the dude who destroyed Gray's Papaya, I'm just gonna be a little upset and maybe throw up!"_

"I thought you might try and be a little supportive?"

_"Me? Supportive? Okay, first of all I was like, the least supportive intern ever."_

"Oh, come on, that's not true..."

_"Yeah, you're just remembering how things went_ after _we ran Johnny Bravo over with the van."_

"Ugh, fine, just... Why can't you just talk to me about this instead of making fun of me?"

_"You're kidding, right? I find out you double-dutched tongues with His Almighty Prince of the Space Lizards and I'm not allowed to make fun of you?"_

"Can you just... You'd have to get to know him better..."

_"Yep, mmhm, okay yeah, I'll just meet him at Starbucks next week and we can chat over lattes and, you know, talk about the number of human babies he's eaten or something."_

"Darce!"

_"Seriously, Jane! What are you doing, why are you wherever the fuck you are, and why are you romantically entangled with Thor's evil brother? What is going on?"_

Jane took a very deep, very troubled breath...

And told Darcy Lewis the whole story.

* * *

"Brother!" beamed Thor.

His smile quickly flipped upside down when he saw the state the younger prince was in.

Thor quickly got up from the bed, from which he'd been trying to get the mechanical blinking box to show him that program about the Midgardians who made cupcakes, and took Loki's forearm.

"Brother!" he gasped. "You look as though you've wrangled a bilgesnipe!"

Loki jerk his arm away wearily.

"Please, _Todd_. I am in no mood for your fussing."

"I've already told you I despise the Midgardian name of Todd! Loki...?"

The god of mischief shrugged off his jacket and couldn't resist laying it gently on the closet shelf before flopping ungracefully on the bed. He stared vacantly at the ceiling and let out a hefty, theatrical sigh.

"Thor?"

"Yes, brother?"

"Have you ever faced a moral quandry?"

"A..."

"Why did I even ask, of course you haven't."

What was making that infernal buzzing noise in the room? Some Midgardian electrical gadget...?

And there was something so unearthly about Loki's expression, something almost eerie. There he lay on the mattress, practically drenched in sweat, tired and yet... Peaceful? Enlightened?

"Have you," asked Thor, "told Jane Foster what you suspect?"

"I do not suspect it. I know it to be true."

Thor frowned. "But how could you possibly...?"

Loki turned onto his side so that he faced away from his older brother.

"I... tested the waters, so to speak," Loki mumbled.

"Ah," replied Thor. "You performed a spell that would confirm Sigyn's identity."

"Actually my methods were a bit more... rudimentary."

Thor felt the very beginnings of dread start to gnaw at his chest.

"Rudimentary... How so?"

"Rudimentary meaning... We embraced."

"Well," said Thor, searching for an excuse, _flailing_ for an excuse, "it is good to know that you have bonded with Jane such that you may share a friendly hug."

And then the two words, the death knell, the two most awful words Thor might ever hear crawled out of his brother's mouth:

"We kissed."

Thor's blood boiled. He saw crimson. Vermillion. Oxblood. The sky cracked and poured down acid rain. Brown clouds spotted his vision and he gave a strangled cry and suddenly Mjölnir was in his hand and before he could think of what to do next he'd brought the hammer straight down on Loki's unsuspecting foot.

* * *

_"He showed you his dead kids?"_

"Yep."

_"Well, fuck."_

"I know- Uh... Hey Darce?"

_"Yeah?"_

"I gotta go... I think I heard someone scream like, really really loud."

_"Okay yeah, yeah good luck with that."_

"Thanks, we'll talk soon... Sorry to do this..."

_"No! No no, go, you know... the screaming."_

"Yeah... Bye."

* * *

Loki had now officially thrown up twice in his lifetime.

And all in the span of one week. Tsk, tsk. Not a stellar track record.

Through the thick, blazing lumps of flaming pain in his foot he realized he should have known better. Much better. Thor was the god of thunder. The God of Thunder. And as far as Loki had seen, he was also the God of Unbridled Tempers. There had been absolutely nothing unpredictable about this incredibly agonizing outcome. He told his brother he had locked lips with his former lady; his brother maimed him. Nothing unusual in the slightest.

But laying on the bed with the phrase perched on his tongue, it had just been so, _so _tempting: the old urge to wound his brother with his words. It had always been his only true weapon against Thor, his only chance at coming out on top in a fight.

More times than not, however, Thor was splendid at physical retaliation.

This instance was no exception.

There had been no time to contemplate whether or not he was going to vomit. Oh no. His body had basically found the "x" in the algebraic equation that involved one's foot being smashed to a pulp without warning by one of the most powerful weapons in the known universe. And that "x" had turned out to be "eject stomach contents."

Had the Chitauri smashed his feet to a pulp? More times than he could count. But he'd always seen it coming. Not many masters of torture snuck up on their victims from behind.

And not many masters of torture knew how to wield Mjölnir.

He would never be used to that confounded smell. Breath was having a difficult time finding his lungs as it was. He could not bear to look at his foot. It had to look like a sideshow deformity. Curse his loose tongue.

Loki inhaled a shaky scrap of a breath, stopped his brain from screaming in agony just long enough to grip the magic he'd need to heel his foot almost completely. He let the sparks work their way down through his ankle, felt the pain soften, breathed deeper, wiped the traces of bile from his mouth, sat up and whirled around in time to see Jane Foster standing in the doorway, mouth agape.

"What the _hell?_ she cried. "Thor, did you do that?

"And you!" she continued to Loki. "Why would you _tell _him?"

"Could the devil get a little sympathy, perhaps?" Loki posited. "I've just been sick, if anyone cares." He glanced about. Thor stood with Mjölnir in hand, looking as though he wouldn't be afraid to use it again. There was a gaping, plaster-dripping hole in the ceiling, presumably torn by a massive bolt of lightning that had served as an extra power source for the hammer. Jane looked tearful for the umpteenth time and...

A fluttering noise from the yawning maw in the ceiling. At first faint, the flapping of a sparrow's wings, and then...

Yes, Loki was sure of it now.

SHIELD helicopter.

Letting magical security perimeters down to heal a pulverized foot did have its disadvantages.

* * *

**Ahh shameless cliffhanger. Shameless. **

**The plot is picking up speed, though! Tune in soon for more!**

**Thanks guys!**


	28. Chapter 26

**You guys...**

**I can't actually believe it, but I feel this story coming closer and closer to an end! Not like this chapter's the last one... just... I dunno, I feel it in my bones. Haha.**

**But don't worry, there's plenty of good stuff left to cover - and I have future fics in the works in the old brain.**

**Updates from life: bad news, I'm sick again. (Whyyy?) Good news: I got my new headphones in this weekend and have been rediscovering a lot of great recordings.**

**Thanks everyone for your support, especially new reviewers and followers. Everyone is awesome.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

Loki crinkled his brow, threw a magical shield over Jane, launched a jet of flashes from his palms and smacked the helicopter down like a fruit fly.

It went down throwing sparks in a series of crackling explosions, wheezing whooshes, the _pewpewpew_ of engines gasping their dying breaths, and smashed unceremoniously into the dust behind the motel. Loki blinked and picked a piece of shrapnel out of his hair. He cast off a short snort of laughter. Had SHIELD really been foolish enough to follow him after their last encounter? Humans: dogged in their pursuits of justice and willfully ignorant of their own fragility.

Fragility...

"That won't have been the last of them," Loki said, squinting into the sky through the now-widened crater in the ceiling. "Jane, please get in the closet and keep your head down."

"Are you _serious_?" Jane cried indignantly. Her hands balled into fists. Of course she would protest. Her feisty frown would have been endearing had the flapping sound of more copters not been approaching.

"I made a promise to you in that room that I would never let any harm come to you," Loki said. "I would appreciate it if you would let me try and keep that promise."

"You've endangered her enough already by not returning to Asgard as arranged last week," growled Thor, apparently not responding well to the self-prescribed Mjölnir therapy. "This should not be happening to her."

"And can you not see I'm trying to fix that? It was her idea to smuggle me to New Mexico in the first place!"

Jane's voice from across the room, "Again, talking about me like I'm not here!"

"Loki is right, Jane," said Thor, his bright eyes locked on his brother. "You might want to stay out of our way."

"Oh, yes, fantastic!" cried Loki, gesticulating wildly, his voice climbing higher. "Let's have it out right here while SHIELD descends on our heads and Jane is in the line of fire! Because grudge matches solve everything!"

"When last I checked, it was me that was made to bear the brunt of _your_ grudge, Loki - as well as the entire city of New York. I said I would have a bone to pick with you when you were healed..."

"Jane," rushed Loki through clenched teeth, "closet. Now.

"And you've picked several bones with me, Thor," he snapped at his brother. "A whole foot full of them."

"Guys..." Jane said.

"If you cared for Jane, you would have left her somewhere safe as soon as you were you were able to tend to your own injuries."

"If _you_ cared for Jane, perhaps you would not have left her alone with _me_!"

"Guys..."

"I was trying to get you safely home, Loki!"

"Good- good!" Loki felt the veins in his neck surging. "Because that is _all I ever wanted!_"

Loki's head swirled in the silence that followed. He tried to speak again but could find no words. He... He had not realized that the sentence would spring from his lips without irony or spite. All of the venom and bile he'd prepared to pack into the words had vanished the moment they were on his lips. It was going to be an insult, final and vile and beautiful - and it had spilled out as a confession. Unbelievable. He felt something melting in his chest. His eyes burned. His mouth fell open. His breath snared in the back his throat.

His eyes locked with Thor's. The god of thunder no longer looked angry. His lips were drawn into a tight smile, his eyes wise and sad and narrowed. He gazed at Loki as if to say, _Yes, brother. I know. I always knew._

He looked - and here Loki was forced to suppress a wan chuckle of recognition - he looked exactly like his father.

The resemblance burned its way through Loki's nerves and pounded at his heart. He saw and heard it all: Odin, Frigga, Sif and the Warriors Three, the sun over the cliffs and the stinging of the seas, the sound of hooves and the laughter of his sons...

Finally, really and truly, he wanted to go home.

Jane's voice broke the stillness.

"_Guys!_"

Loki shook his head quickly. Reveries were dangerous at the moment. Jane...

Jane was staring up through the ceiling as a massive brigade of SHIELD aircraft swarmed over the motel like hulking vultures.

Loki's chest buzzed. He flexed his hands and let magic flash over his body; he emerged from its golden bath in full battle armor. Thor shot him a "you're-not-going-to-make-me-watch-_you-_have-all-the-fun" grin, which Loki answered by magicking the blonde god into his own battle gear.

"Good," said Jane, her eyes darting between the two of them, making sure they weren't launching themselves at one another. "Good. Okay... no more fighting. I mean each other. Fight SHIELD. Don't fight each other. Yeah. Um... You guys... You look nice."

"Why thank you," said Loki. "Now Jane, if you will pardon me-"

And perhaps it was the bravado that came from donning a cape and a massive antlered helm, but Loki could not help but indulge instinct: he swept in, lifted Jane easily off her feet with both arms and planted a kiss on her lips.

"You're a maniac," said Jane.

"You are most welcome," Loki replied. A grin split his lips and he looked into Jane's sweet dark eyes and waited.

Jane crossed her arms across her chest mid-air.

Loki exhaled. Mortal stubbornness abound.

"You are still not going in the closet, are you?"

"I didn't come all this way with you two," yelled Jane, forced to shout over the humming of the aircraft, "to be shoved in a closet! And I'm definitely not _more_ likely to go because you kissed me. You're not... You know... You're not bad at it, but seriously?"

The helicopters thumped their wings overhead. Loki looked at Thor for some help, expecting him to be glaring at their unorthodox physical arrangement with fresh anger. Instead the older god's mouth was twisted as if he were trying to bite back a laugh at the sight of Jane dangling stubbornly from Loki's hands.

Loki might have almost laughed himself at the absurdity of the situation if he hadn't heard the ominous popping of machine gun fire.

He whipped his head skyward, still holding onto Jane, no time to contemplate what to do with her. His brain slowed seconds to hours and he saw each bullet, stinging and solid and nasty, cutting through the air, gunning straight for his head and then-

A magnificent BANG right beside his ear. Another. Another. Another. Another. Thirteen deafening, short bangs and each machine gun shell peeled away and liquified in midair and rained down little droplets of cooling lead.

He squinted. He gaped. He squinted. His shook his head quickly and turned his face down and looked at Jane.

Jane's eyes were plastered wide open in pure shock, transfixed on her left hand, which was stretched out directly next to Loki's ear, palm skyward...

And smoking.

Jane's hand was smoking.

* * *

_The crystal vase smashed into the wall behind Loki's head and shattered with a great tinkling crash._

_"You did not have to do that," he said, feeling hollow, staring at the shards as they tumbled to the floor of his chambers._

_Sigyn stood opposite him, shaking like a leaf. She gaped at her palms._

_"I..." she said, a single tear spilling over her cheek, "I swear I didn't-"_

_"It does not matter," Loki snapped, surprised to find himself shouting, "what you _meant_ to do! You've fed me that line enough recently, I can only stomach so much of it."_

_"Why, why do you insist on doing that?" Sigyn pleaded, eyes blazing. "On cutting me down with hateful words as though I were no more than a blade of dead grass?"_

_"Because you will listen neither to reason nor to pleasantries, not since the very day we were married."_

_"Oh, I rue that day..."_

_"Stop it, stop lying to me," said Loki, advancing on her._

_"It is not a lie," said Sigyn. "If you knew how many years I've been waiting, waiting to become what I am meant to be-"_

_"A wife and mother is not enough?"_

_"You knew what I married you for. You _knew_. Do not bring Váli and Narfi into this."_

_"Ah yes, because they were just two insignificant lumps of flesh that fell out of your-"_

Smack.

_Loki felt the sting what seemed like hours after Sigyn's palm had made contact with his cheek._

_He lifted a frail hand to his face and discovered not only the heat of the slap but also the moisture of his own tears._

_"I do not know," he said, his voice splintering, "what acceptable alternative I may offer you. I do not know what I may give you, or do for you that could make you happy. All I do know is that, regardless of whether it was your intent, you are the mother of two children, and the wife of someone who- Sigyn, do not turn away, I..."_

_He reached out and gently, gently tipped her chin up towards his. _

_"I want you to know that you are loved _here_- by me, by your children, by the people of Asgard. I did not think that after decades and decades of... of what I believed to be happiness... I did not think you could still want to tear yourself away... And for mortality, no less."_

_Sigyn's eyes were the black of a bottomless pit._

_"Then you are in denial," she said, her voice hanging heavy with grief. "If you had felt the darkness, the despair that hangs about these... beings, these magicians with which my family has become so hopelessly entangled, you would not cling to me so selfishly."_

_"How can you not possibly understand I am trying to keep you here for our children-"_

_"They may not survive if I stay!"_

_Loki opened his mouth. Sigyn bit into his words before they started:_

_"Are you really so blind? You, who have so many magical gifts and, and..." her eyes widened with some imagined terror and she flicked her head back and forth, scanning the room. Her voice whittled itself down to a jagged whisper. She feverishly clutched at Loki's collar. "They are here, now, in this room, oh gods please..."_

_Sigyn began to crumple, dragged Loki down as she sank to her knees on the floor. She whimpered, head and hands shaking._

_"They are here, they are here, they are here..."_

_"Who?" said Loki. He grasped Sigyn's shoulders and shook her lightly. "Who, Sigyn? Who are they?"_

_Sigyn shook her head. Loki's chest ached. _

_"Sigyn, who? Who? What are they called? _Who are they?_"_

_"I can't, I can't, oh Valhalla please I can't..."_

_Loki shook her harder._

_"Sigyn for our children! For Váli! And little Narfi! WHO ARE THEY!"_

_Sigyn sniffled and gasped. Shoulders trembling, she wiped beneath her nose with a crooked finger. She took one deep breath in, out, and lifted her ashen lips to Loki's ear._

_"They are called..." she croaked, "the Chitauri."_

* * *

Jane felt incredible.

She thought back to the first time she had ever ridden a bike, really and truly, no training wheels - just took off without her parents watching and ripped down the street of her quiet neighborhood, legs pumping the pedals and heart flying free.

She knew how she _should_ have been feeling at the moment: terrified, confused, afflicted. Agents in a giant helicopter had fired a machine gun - a _machine gun_ - at her... Or more appropriately, at Loki, who they probably assumed had been assaulting her by... picking her up and shaking her around, or something.

And she had blasted sparks out of her hand and melted the bullets.

She - Jane Foster - had melted bullets with her hand. It should have been terrifying.

But it was amazing! This was science- No, no! she instinctively corrected herself...

This was magic... She was magical! And what's more, she had totally felt like she could control it! Not that she had intended to melt the bullets- that had been an instinct. But the instinct had been there. She'd seen the bullets (how she'd even seen them tearing through the air that fast she had no idea), and a little voice in her head, a little green light had flickered up and had told her, go, do it, hold you hand up and stop them. It's so easy. Just stop them.

Just stop them.

Jane smiled wider than she ever had before. She looked at her smoking hand, then at Loki, about to blurt out, did you see that?

But Loki's face stopped her words in their tracks.

He looked positively gray. Petrified. His eyes had gone pale, as though someone had shot bleach through his veins. He gingerly lowered her to the ground.

Another round of machine gun fire. Bullets zooming. Jane held her hand up. A series of sharp cracks. Bullets melting.

Simple.

"Brother," said Thor from across the room, winding Mjölnir into a frenzy in his hand. "You should equip Jane Foster with a suit of armor."

"She does not understand what she has just done and neither do I," hissed Loki. "It is a remenant of her link with Sigyn and it could be unspeakably dangerous. She will stay under a protective shield until I may discuss it further with her."

"Pardon the pun, brother," said Thor, sending down a copter with crack of lightning, "but we have a more important SHIELD to worry about. We are far outnumbered."

As if to echo Thor's statement, a blast of gunfire roared out from the heavens and caught Loki square on the shoulder. He shouted, lurched forward, coughed a few loud, long hacks as he waited for magic to suture the wound, stood up and sent his green eyes blaring straight into Jane's. He sighed and shook his head, and raised his hand in her direction.

"Stay in this room," he said to her, as she felt the serene glow of magic start to cover her, "and continue performing that magic I do not approve of. Thor and I will be in and out. You are to use it only as a defense mechanism, am I understood? No attacks, no unnecessary use of force."

Jane nodded... and lowered her eyes to take in her armor.

Her beautiful, blue and silver battle armor.

Jane had never considered herself a fighter... but her heart was racing with excitement. She'd been waiting, ever since she'd met Thor, to truly be a part of the action, to serve a function that wasn't just van driver, or nurse, or researcher.

She had a gift, regardless of what it meant. And for now, she could use it.

"You're... You're sure about this?" she asked Loki, whose hands were already starting to crackle with freshly forming ice.

"I would love to say I had a choice in the matter," said Loki, "but my shoulder is goading the rest of my body into telling me otherwise.

"Besides," he continued, running his eyes up and down Jane's armored form, "I must say Asgardian uniform suits you quite nicely."

He winked and hurled a jet of ice at a low-hanging helicopter.

_Asgardian uniform, huh? _Jane thought_._

_I could get used to it._

* * *

"Can somebody tell me," said Nick Fury with foreboding evenness, "how this mission turned into a god damn shitstorm?"

Agent Maria Hill cleared her throat. "Well, sir, it turns out Jane Foster is magical."

Fury turned his good eye, slowly, to glare at Hill across the control room.

"Excuse me?" he said, squaring his hips.

Damn, he was scary.

Maria Hill thought about clearing her throat again and decided once had been enough.

"Magical, sir. She can... Well, she can melt bullets with her bare hands."

Again Fury turned, slowly, (if he had to turn to see the monitors he was going to make it look as though it was his own damn choice), and played the tape back again.

"And that's what I'm seeing on this feed? Not one of their little goddess pals? A five foot two astrophysicist... is melting machine gun bullets?"

"That's about it, sir."

Fury's brow wrinkled deeper than a bulldog's chin. He dipped his chin and brought a hand up to massage his forehead.

"Can somebody get me on the New York line?"

"On it, sir," said Hill.

As she turned around to notify the agent in telecommunications, she could have sworn she heard Fury mutter under his breath,

"Stark is gonna have my guts for garters."

* * *

**It's gonna be a showdown, people. A SHOWDOWN.**

**Looks like more parties are getting involved in the desert smackdown. Should be fun. Also, will Jane's newly revealed ability attract unwanted attention of a... cosmic sort?**

**Turns out Sigyn's family had ties with the Chitauri. Coincidence, then, that the Chitauri were pushing Sigyn to become a mortal, and later helped Loki attempt to conquer Earth? I think not. But what, oh what does it all mean?**

**Answers to come! And next time we'll get the final details about Baldr's death. Big chap coming soon, guys, don't miss it!**

**Thanks, everyone!**


	29. Chapter 27

**You guys.**

**I ran into speed bumps while completing this! Namely work. And moving.  
**

**I can't apologize enough for the wait. All I can say is that I hope it was worth it!  
**

**Also, thank you so so so much to everyone who's stuck by this fic, including my new reviewers and followers. So many hugs for you all.  
**

**IMPORTANT: I'm gonna veer from myth canon, comic canon, etc. a little in this chap. Just go with it. :)  
**

**Without further ado...  
**

* * *

The beating of the dying helicopters' wings sounded like the roaring of thunder.

Or maybe that was just Thor's actual thunder.

Rain fell in thick sheets from the crackling sky, dumping droves of water through the ceiling, pounding down on the aircraft. Lightning cleaved whiplash arcs through the air. Ice jumped from Loki's hands and froze the rain surrounding an entire helicopter. The craft halted midair, trapped in a rigid, frosted cage of raindrops; Loki swiped his hand to the side and brought the vehicle sliding down into the dirt.

Machine gun fire. Jane held up her hand and watched the bullets liquify. She felt the heat of a single bullet ricochet off her armor. She screamed and jumped back. In the corner of her eye she saw both Thor and Loki's heads whip in her direction.

"I'm okay!" she shouted, feeling the hot phantom pressure of the bullet's impact.

"I am still in favor of the closet scenario!" shouted Loki as he blasted another craft to the ground.

"But I'm _magical__!_" countered Jane, realizing how idiotic it sounded even as she said it.

"Gnomes are magical, but I would not choose them as a sparring partner!"

"I concur on that account, brother!" boomed Thor.

"So you're comparing me to a gnome?" cried Jane.

"A strikingly beautiful, intelligent gnome!" yelled Loki.

"You're insane!"

"Is that not the second time you've pointed that out in the past two hours?"

_Two_ _hours?_

"We've been doing this for _two hours?"_ cried Jane.

"What's the Midgardian adage..." Loki mused. "Ah- 'Time flies when you are having fun!'"

He turned his attention from the fray to wink at Jane and instantly was clipped on the side of the head by another bullet.

"I thought melting these was _you__r_ specialty!" he shrieked at Jane.

"Sorry, sorry!" Jane cried. "Don't smile at me like that if you don't want a head wound!"

Thunder cracked across the New Mexican sky.

"Fair enough," Loki sighed.

* * *

_Sigyn was combing Narfi's hair and singing in old Norse, low and clear and wandering:_

_"I saw for Balder, the bleeding god, / The son of Odin, his destiny set: / Famous and fair, in the lofty fields, / Full grown in strength, the mistletoe stood..."  
_

The mistletoe._  
_

_Loki's heart plummeted with dread._

_Black eyes looked up from sheaths of white to meet his gaze.  
_

_"My husband," the customary greeting was droled out, Sigyn's crimson lips smiling sneaky and serene.  
_

_"My lady," greeted Loki, voice tight. He strode over to Narfi and planted a kiss on the boy's newly combed head. "Run along, son. Go find your brother."  
_

_"He resembles you more with each passing day, it seems," said Sigyn, watching Narfi scamper off. "They both do."  
_

_"There is a reason you called me here."  
_

_Sigyn smoothed her gown in her lap, eyes flashing.  
_

_"The telepathy was successful, then."  
_

_"To be honest it was a bit shaky. You forget time and time again that magically, I hear signals better than you send them."  
_

_"Perhaps your telepathy is stronger," said Sigyn, standing, locking her eyes with her husband's, "but _you_ forget time and time again that it is just one more gift I may take from you at my will." _

_"Modesty becomes you."  
_

_"Far more than does the garb of a wife and mother, I'll admit."  
_

_"I think we're both agreed on that..."  
_

_"Although," said Sigyn, "if I were not pressed by the Chitauri to abandon you I may have enjoyed several more centuries of marriage."  
_

_"Hark how the silvertongue's beloved sweetens her_ own_ words when she is about to request a favor!"  
_

_"'Request' was not the word I had in mind. In any event, you are in no position to refuse."  
_

_"And if I call your bluff?"  
_

_"Sorry, husband," Sigyn replied, her voice suddenly devoid of playfulness, "I've run out of bluffs for you to call."  
_

_ A strange silence fell around the couple. Loki's head quickly filled it with the collective buzzing of all the decades of their marriage, the memories that were about to be swiftly and thoroughly ruined. Immortality, he'd realized early on, meant sacrificing great portions of personal history to the ceaselessly grinding mill of future centuries. The only solace was the potential for Ragnarok, The End, the great reset button. There was no way of knowing how many times it had happened in the past, how many times it would happen in the future. Sometimes after long nights of dreamless sleep, Loki felt as weak as a human being, with only a fresh new dawn to rely on and only his reacquaintance with sleep to aspire to.  
_

_He had thought Sigyn might have changed that. Apparently, he had thought wrong.  
_

_"Do you not look at our sons," Loki asked Sigyn, "and forget about every personal aspiration you've ever used to threaten me?"  
_

_Tears jumped to Sigyn's eyes without warning. She pushed her lips together.  
_

_She said quietly, "I truly wish I could."  
_

* * *

"Gimme the situation on the ground, Jarvis."

_"The 'situation' is actually partially in the air, sir."_

"'Kay. Smartass time is over."

_"My apologies, sir. There appears to be a sharp peak in electromagnetic activity directly above the coordinates you suggested, accompanied by severe precipitation and a significant dip below normal climate temperatures in this season and location."_

"Rain and lightning. Thor. Check. What else you got?"

_"At least five aircraft have gone down, one remains. I'm reading... three targets, all on foot."_

"Nothing we can't handle."

A magnificent streak of lightning forked across the clouds direclty in front of the suit. He swerved, just barely avoided electrocution, saw the heart rate monitor on the inside of his helmet pick up speed.

"Right, Jarvis?"

* * *

Maria Hill tried to look Nick Fury in the eye when she spoke to him. It was a difficult task, especially during times of stress.

And oh boy, was this ever a time of stress.

Luckily for her, Fury's eye was focused intently on the monitors lining the walls of SHIELD's covert control room. They had gone dark on this mission, even darker than SHIELD's usual covert M.O. Hill wasn't totally on board with the way Fury was handling it, but far, far be it for her to raise an eyebrow...

She realized quickly that her eyebrow was raised. Dammit.

"You haven't shipped out any of the others, sir?" she asked. By 'others,' she meant 'Avengers,' - but she still felt ridiculous referring to them by their now-hyped title.

"No," said Fury, not turning to look at her, "we only have Stark on this one. Clearly Thor is down there already and I don't even wanna _know_ why I'm having to send one of them after another one of them."

Hill felt poised to ask what positive effects Fury could've possibly foreseen coming out of leaving volatile superbeings to their own devices. She bit her tongue instead and turned to assist the agents who were taking casualty reports from the combat site. At this point, hearing about casualties was easier than figuring out how to react to Fury.

As she started walking across the room, though, she heard Fury's voice call to her, loud and unmistakeably clear:

"Maria."

She turned around, hoping her face didn't look skeptical.

It was the first time Fury had ever, _ever_ used her first name.

She stepped closer to him. His face looked sad and tired and somehwat gray.

He dipped his head a bit before saying, "I'm going to give Stark kill on sight authorization."

Hill frowned deeply. This was... This was so unlike him...

"Sir-" she began.

"You know better than anyone else that if there was another route to take, I would be the first to take it. There's been too much damn destruction on our planet, and it all points back to one person. One... god. He could've gone back to where he came from but he didn't. It's gotta end. And Stark is going in there to end it."

Hill nodded slowly, said, "Does Stark know what he's being asked to do?"

Fury shook his head and sighed.

"He will in a few minutes."

* * *

_In the moment that Sigyn pulled Loki's will and control from his body, he envisioned his children._

_A scene hemorraged behind his eyelids, so vivid and so disjointed that he could not tell whether it was dream or memory:  
_

_Narfi, out of jealousy toward Váli's superior skill at archery, had snapped his older brother's bow in two overnight. Váli, older and stronger, was poised to deliver a blow to his younger brother's face. Loki felt himself standing impossibly far away from them, and the moment before Váli's fist met Narfi's eye Loki was unable to shout to his son, unable to stop him. He watched the two brothers on the verge of fighting, of tears, of enmity...  
_

_A scream from Narfi as Váli's fist found its mark.  
_

_But no...  
_

_The scream belonged to Balder.  
_

_Loki awoke from the reverie and no longer saw his children, but his brother, crumpled on the ground a small distance away.  
_

_The shaft of an arrow sprouted from Balder's bloodied chest. Baldr opened and closed his mouth, screwed his dark eyes up in incomprehensible pain. He clasped his hands gingerly around the arrow, and for an absurd moment he seemed to be praying, like a dying Midgardian in battle.  
_

_Loki barely had time to breathe before he saw the leaves sprouting from the shaft...  
_

_Mistletoe.  
_

_Loki felt something long and light in his hands. He knew what it was.  
_

_He dropped the bow and ran toward the palace; his sole option now – for himself, for his children – was to beg.  
_

* * *

The last aircraft hit the ground with a crushing, crunching roar.

Loki dusted the last of the snowflakes from his hands. Miniscule shards of ice scraped the skin of his palms.

He looked at Thor, who, with arms crossed, somehow seemed both incredibly satisfied and incredibly disquieted.

He looked at Jane (Jane, Jane, _Jane_), who seemed flustered and shaky but still wore her armor quite well. Loki fought the surreal vision that was beginning to crowd out logical thinking: Jane in Asgardian finery, stealing little glances at him across the feast table, the way Thor would flirt with Sif in their youth...

Loki shook his head a bit and sent out his customary injury-detecting probes, first for Jane and then for himself. Jane had lost a tiny chunk of her hair, most likely clipped off by a whizzing bullet. Otherwise, the armor he'd magicked for her had done it's work well.

His own injuries were superficial. He felt the pinpointed ache of a couple lodged bullets, but his body's own natural healing process would propel those out nicely. If he'd ever believed in miracles, he would refer to this moment as a small one.

"What now?" said Jane. Loki noticed that Thor still could not look at her when she spoke.

"We wait to see what they shall send next," replied Loki, "and do what we can, with what we have."

"The last time I remember being in this situation, brother," said Thor sadly, "we were fighting on opposite sides."

"Thank you for pointing that out, Thor," said Loki, fighting tooth and nail to edge the sarcasm out of his voice. "Here's hoping we remain on the same side for the time being, otherwise I'm afraid the outcome will be shoddy for the both of us."

Almost unexpectedly, Thor smiled, but something caught his attention and his smile was swiftly broken by a frown. He turned his eyes toward the clouds; ironically, he looked as if he were watching for an oncoming storm.

Loki followed his brother's eyes skyward and saw... What was it...

He saw not a storm, but a small collection of white lights, a tiny pair of streaking gold jets...

And a single, luminous spot of blue.

* * *

**Bahhhh.**

**I know this is short and I know there's a cliffhanger. Curses! But I _promise_, next chapter EVERYTHING is gonna come to a head.  
**

**Again, really really so much thanks to everyone sticking by this. You won't be sorry you did! :)  
**


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